sounds familiar

Sharaun and I are in bed watching a show on Netflix.

It is a dramatic moment; we are just about to learn an important new clue about the possible identity of the killer.

Through the bedroom door enters Keaton, our almost-fifteen daughter.

“I have an announcement!” She proclaims, holding both hands up near-head height in a stop-listen-this-is-important display.

“Hang on let us pause the show,” says Sharaun, “This is an important part.”

“My announcement is important, too,” says Keaton.

Show paused, killer temporarily safe from our discovery, we both turn our attention to Keaton. “OK, what’s up?,” asks Mom.

Lowering her hands a little, but not fully, she pushes the air forward with each word, as if to emphasize them, or maybe to help push them from her to us.

“I am in a romantic relationship with Andrew.”

Sharaun and I shoot quick smiling glances at each other as we launch into genuine, non-condescending, laughter.

Keaton follows-up quickly, she’s smiling now, too, seeing our reactions. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell you!” Small pause… “He already told his Mom!”

“Well, thanks for letting us know,” we say (or something close to that, I can’t really recall but I remember not saying “congratulations” as it felt wrong).

Two weeks back at school face-to-face and already be-boyfriended.

And there it is.

My brother and I were chatting the other day and I asked him if he remembered when we were kids and Dad came home from work with a bootleg CATV descrambler.

It was probably 1985 or 1986. It remember it being a very small black rectangular box. A simple thing: coaxial in, coaxial out, and one or two potentiometer-type adjustment dials. I think he got it from our Uncle Tom, one of those “uncles” that’s not really a blood uncle. I never knew my dad to be a the kind of guy to “steal,” but I think bootleg CATV descramblers in the mid-80s were kind of like Napster in the late 1990s… they hit the scene and boom: stuff that used to cost money was free. Maybe came-on too fast and were so simple you didn’t really spend much time considering about the ethical implications. I suppose it was basically just a set of adjustable filters for the analog signal, maybe with enough looped passes to be effectively “universal?”

Anyway then we had HBO, and HBO was a big deal to me. I saw movies I should have never seen at my age: Maximum Overdrive, Return of the Living Dead, as well as fell in love with shows like Brain Games.

I remember it working for a few years then becoming obsolete. This would have still pre-dated the digital transition by quite a few years so it must have been the cable companies getting smarter about how they scrambled things.

My brother remembered it, too, it must have been a thing for us.

On my way to work there is a billboard advertising The Flintstones on television. Weeknights, 6pm. I’ve spent more than a few minutes thinking about it.

Does The Flintstones, which originally ran from 1960 to 1966, still have billboard-level recognition & draw? Don’t get me wrong I love the Flintstones. It’s right up there with Gilligan’s Island for me. Now, it’s not Andy Griffith Show caliber, but it’s certainly enjoyable.

But adults are seeing this billboard. I think about Sally-everywoman. She’s driving to work in the morning. She does medical encoding in a small office. She’s in teal scrubs, listening to the 107.7 FM morning zoo. Her car is coated in condensation because she parks it outside at the apartment complex where she lives. It’s Tuesday. She needs to get some milk on the way home, for the mac & cheese.

As she turns left on Forsyth she sees a billboard towering at the roadside. The Flintstones. Weeknights 6pm.

Oh, The Flintstones!

I wonder if I can get my milk & be home by 6pm?

I hope it’s not one of the episodes near the end where they had that stupid space alien that only Fred could see.

Some advertising exec at MeTV lights a fat cigar & sips cognac.

In 1988 we moved from Lompoc, California to Rockledge, Florida.

I’ve probably written about it before, I’m sure it’s here somewhere… but my writing has been so sporadic over the past several years, and I wrote so much when I was writing… that I can’t find it.

As it was told to me, and has I’ve relayed it all my life thence, our move was precipitated by NASA’s decision (or maybe it was Lockheed, or Marietta, or some other defense company associated with the program) to no longer user southern California for Space Shuttle operations. My dad worked on the Shuttle program and was given the option to move to Houston or Cape Canaveral. I remember he did at least one TDY in Canaveral, maybe two, before we decided to move there. I remember him being gone, it being just Mom at home. So, to Florida we went.

On the radio coming home the other day I heard the song You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive, and, as music is so wonderful at doing, I was hit with memories of the time just before we left California. I checked the year of release for that track and, sure enough, it was in 1987. That got me thinking… could I do a little “memory project” where I grabbed music from certain years, and just see what comes back to mind while listening?

This would be more than just your standard “put on some 80s music & roll the dice” kind of reminiscing. Maybe a more structured approach. In the early days, I listened to what my folks listened to, which was mostly what was on the radio. So, maybe a year-by-year playlist of the top-N tracks to get it going. Maybe pair that up, in a spreadsheet, of course, with the big events that I can remember or find via research.

Actually, both columns of data on this imaginary spreadsheet are interesting to me. On the one side, music! On the other side, life history! The idea of putting together the timeline is intriguing… of charting some of those events… of putting dates to memories that I have but have never really appreciated in a chronology. Examples:

• • Public records show our folks bought the Florida house on July 1st, 1988 (for $75,000, no less)
  • The current Lompoc school district calendar says the last day for students is June 10th. I’m sure this has changed in 40 years, but it’s close enough for estimation. I remember we had to leave California early, before the last day of school. I bet I could pin this down…
  • When we got to Florida, Dad’s job put us up in a beachside condo while we looked for the aforementioned house. I remember being there for more than a month, because we had to move units when one month was up, and I should be able to check that with John

Then I thought (and this is all still in the car driving home listening to You Spin Me Round), although it started with the CA-to-FL timeframe, I could expand the effort to chart important songs vs. important life-events period. And then-then I thought, as I began to develop my own tastes and moved away from just listening to what my folks listened to, I dove deep into music history. I could even chart the release years of the songs I remember listening to at certain times… maybe there would be some cool correlation there, like I discovered the 60s in the 90s, or the my 1998 was largely music from 1973, etc.

Doing it.

Saturday. A really nice do-nothing Saturday.

Cleaned the cars; something I never do. Vacuumed, wiped-down, spot-cleaned upholstery, the works. Felt good. One of those things that swells a pride in ownership. Took longer than I thought – hours. But what else was I doing? The startup is stopped-up, and my day-job does not, per design, intrude on my evenings or weekends. So, cleaning cars is a great use of time.

Cars… driving…

Keaton will be fifteen in a few weeks. Fifteen!

When? How? I can close my eyes and lean my head back and feel the tiny weight of her asleep on my bare chest. I can hear her little baby-talk voice, and I still often on-purpose mispronounce words the way she did as she was learning. She has become such an amazing person as she’s gotten older.

I’ve been giving her lessons. I let her drive the car around the lot where we store the RV, gave her the wheel the other weekend as we drove on the sand at the beach. She’s a natural, I think… she has a good feel for the vehicle. She’s intimidated by traffic, and sometimes by my direction (I can hear my dad’s edge in my voice when I’m giving stern commands).

Married twenty-one years with a fifteen year old and a ten year old. Whoa.

What?

Today when I got home from work Sharaun told me some guys had come to the door earlier hawking rooftop solar. She said they’d likely be stopping back back after 5pm since she told them that’s when I’d be home.

Shortly after 6pm, as I was washing-up after a lovely dinner, the doorbell rang. I was in the kitchen and, I have to believe, clearly visible through the glass panels at the sides of our door. Jeopardy was on the TV, turned up loud so I could hear over the running water and clinking of dishes. I mean, people were clearly home.

But I just kept on doing dishes and shouting out my answers to the Jeopardy questions (I don’t do the “form of a question” thing from home; no time for that crap just shout out the answer). Cohen prompted, “Dad, the doorbell.” I replied, loud enough to be heard, I think, “I know buddy, I’m not answering it.” He looked confused.

It’s so great, you know… having a “place.” A place where you don’t have to answer the door even if they can see you. They are a cinder-block-width away, so close to closing another roof’s worth of solar panels, and their mark is just standing there, elbow-deep in soap suds, garbage disposal whirring and Alex Trebek asking something about William Tecumseh Sherman, denying them… no… not even acknowledging their existence.

Sales is hard man.

I know, I’ve written this theme to death.

I have a hang-up, maybe my over-arching, foremost hang-up. around “finishing.” Being completely done with a thing, so that the next thing can begin. Marking time by the doing-and-finishing of these things, and, maybe worst – serializing other things behind the current yet-undone, thing. I miss things because I’m too focused on finishing things.

What’s more, my imaginary finish lines are often based on nonsensical or arbitrary criteria. What’s even more, I find that, most times, I’m fairly unprepared for what’s next when I do satisfy those imaginary completion criteria. What’s even even more, sometimes that lack of preparedness is accompanied by disappointment or even a sense of loss.

So let’s review then: I get hyper-focused on getting-done. Buuuut, both the “things” I’m obsessed with getting done, and the success criteria for getting them done, are wholly made-up constructs that mean nothing. This scheduling and need to be done is causing me to serialize experiences, and likely miss things or at least spread my focus disproportionally.

This is probably the thing about myself I most want to work on. In fact, I want to get it done by March and I already have the checklist that will tell me it’s complete. That was a joke. But, truly, I do want to work on this. I’m not sure how. I am going to do some research, ask people I love.

Peace.