BLA BLA FISH CAKES

Back in the madding "old days" when we wore mini skirts one minute and got thin as sticks and the next we hid our fine bone structures under midi's until denim saved us all, I was a fashion buyer for Garlicks.

It was my favourite job.  I fell in love with the whole business of Garlicks. Hat departments, gloves, stockings, scarves and bags, the glorious showroom with lah-di-dah ladies wear and a restaurant with fine food for lunch.

I smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, with a filter, by then, having given up the Texan plain after spitting out fragments of tobacco and ripping the skin off half my lips often enough.   I could not get used to smoking. It was hard. I hated the smell and the taste, but damn, I thought it looked cool, so I went on and on until I found Lucky Strike.  Bob's your uncle we used to say.  By then I could drink whiskey too, neat, and leave Rhodesians under the table after a challenge.  I was so stressed that it didn't touch sides.

I forgot about Carol King, who sang the background music to my life back then, until one of her songs fell into a movie I watched today.  Oddly, I thought.   I loved her, but I find I can't stand the lyrics now.  I feel pure sorry for my young self just listening to that lot.  She had a pretty voice though.

The lads tried to make sense of my young self, tall and tanned and young and lovely and all that...

"You have complexes," was a favourite of theirs.

I wanted to know things and I was passionate about it. Why is that complex, I wondered? What did the other girls talk about?

"You are ethereal," one kind lad said after he followed me to the toilet on the beach, and walked me back to the group who were so insignificant I can't remember any of them except this lad.  I was married. It was as good as dead to the world. Catholics can't get divorced. My husband had lost his lustre.  I was too busy learning stuff to notice.

Ethereal.  It sounded pleasant.  But, I had to look that up.  Not that I knew what they meant about me having complexes, but I was doing my damndest to find out,  The Library was my Google.  A library, back in the day, was something profound. The smell of it. The feel of it and God bless the quiet of it.  I could spend hours searching for my complexes.

In my old age, someone had the audacity to tell me that I was too complex. 

I swear the more brains a man has the more ridiculous he is.

Another fellow said, "You would kill me." 

In my mind, I am thinking, "Hey? How?" "Why?

I met this guy in the smoking section. He lives in a caravan.  I am not in the market, so to speak, but one can always use a fellow to go to movies with or drink a bottle of wine with,  I am old, after all, and reasonable company, I think, but he came to a dead stop after he offered to heal me.

I am thinking, "Hey? From what?  Nah.  Not today.

Clearly, I am not your average flower in the garden. 

There I was thinking how nice I am. Just goes to show.

Well, I watched all the movies. Alotalot more than three times.  Maybe that's it.

We didn't have Emma Thompson. We had Katherine Hepburn, the smouldering Sir Alan Arthur Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd ( the title was exactly right for me ), Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson... Whatever happened to Glenda Jackson?  Mia Farrow... yes.

Clint Eastwood was young.   My sister loved him until he acted in a movie that abused an Orangutang, and I am down with that; bastards!  No matter what he acts in I see this poor animal's eyes looking back at me.

"How dare you?"  As my grandson would say.

But, now we can't bear to look at Dustin Hofman, even in Last Chance Harvey with Emma Thompson.

It took years for me to get over The Deer Hunter.   I can still feel the angst of it. Robert De Niro was put into ice after that.  We were still human back then and the chaos of this film was too extreme for my young heart.  I saw it again, years later, and I was shocked at how little it shocked me, compared to the first time.  I only saw it once.  Being as we had no DVD's back then, I would not pay to see it twice.   I saw Dr Chivago quite a few times,   I had romance running through my veins then.

I'm watching a sweet movie. It made me write this. The Leisure Seeker.  It's true romance in pictures.

Alzheimer's. I remember us watching Mom leave us, and then sitting with her through her last three weeks, weeks of renewed encounters with a stranger, every 5 minutes.  But this is a happier story so far.   It might make me cry when I least expect it. 

I am grateful.  At least I still feel stuff - I am on medication to keep me on the planet with my supposed complexes.  The specialists tell me it is not addictive, and in the next breathe, they tell me I can never get off it.  I will more than likely go mad. 

Well, I won't go mad.  I will cry a bit, but I should be a complete hermit by then with a nice old black man to drive me about and help me shop, God willing I have any money.

My favourite movie star is Christopher Walken,  He's just so odd you have to love him.  Just so you know, he's talking about pool, the game, not actual murder.   Just saying.  For the population of the Unknown Region, that is,  You guys can get stuff so wrong sometimes,

I read somewhere that he makes up his own lines,  In an interview, he says, as a child star, if they gave him a line he would forget it.  He also lives in the woods.  A kindred spirit,.

Anyway, let me get back to my sweet movie with Donald Sutherland's obsession with Hemingway.  I read Hemingway, alotalot.

Love and Light my lovelies.

P.S.  I cried in the sweet movie, which went out with a song from the old days.  Bla. Bla. Fish Cakes.