Kris took yesterday off to can tomatoes with Jenn. Both were inundated by ripe tomatoes, and with the onset of the rain there was danger that the fruit would swell and burst and become generally less useful. Mostly they canned Jenn’s salsa. Kris picked some of my Super Hot Thai peppers from our garden. Part of her day was spent cutting these (and, if I know Jenn, de-seeding them before use). By the evening, Kris’ hands burned from the accumulated pepper oils. She rubbed lotion on them. She soaked them in a bowl of ice. She put more lotion on them. She slept with an icepack in her hands. Poor Kris!

For dinner, Kris made chicken pot pie. As we were eating, Jenn asked me how my knee was doing.

“Ah, not so well today,” I said. “Physical therapy was painful. My knee hurts.”

General sympathy. Kris noted that for the first two months after my surgery I was diligent about my rehabilitation, doing every exercise that was required of me. Then, one day, I just gave up. Now my recovery is behind, and it’s because my mental fortitude just isn’t there.

“Tyler asked me how my home exercises were going,” I said. “I lied to him. I told him that they’re going okay. I told him that I don’t do them every day but that I do them.”

The conversation continued.

A bit later, Hank interrupted: “Why did you lie?” His mind was back several sentences, parsing the fact that for some reason I’d lied.

Jeremy smacked me upside the head. Hard. “J.D. lied because he is a bad person,” he said.

“He shouldn’t have lied,” Jenn said.

“It was wrong of me to lie,” I said.

Sometimes I forget that the kids are there, you know?

---

When I was a kid, it seemed that my parents listened to the same records again and again. (Actually, it was Dad that listened to them; I can’t remember whether Mom liked them, too. Maybe she’ll share.) Long before Abba, Neil Diamond and Simon and Garfunkel were popular in our house.

(We lived in Portland until I was two. Sometime before we moved back to the ancestral homestead, Dad checked out a bunch of books and records from the Portland Public Library: lots of books on boat-building, and a couple of Neil Diamond records, including the Jonathan Livingston Seagull soundtrack. We moved to Canby and the library materials moved with us. Dad never returned them.)

My earliest memory of Simon and Garfunkel is hazy, and probably only resembles the factual truth in a small way. It was a sunny spring Sunday afternoon and I was in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, lying on the bed. I was listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (the only album of theirs that Dad ever owned). Was somebody listening with me? I don’t remember.

I do remember that when “Cecilia” began to play I stood up and jumped around the bed, singing at the top of my lungs. For a long time after I would throw my four- or five-year-old enthusiasm into the lyrics of that song:

Cecilia

Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart
You’re shaking my confidence daily
Oh, Cecilia, I’m down on my knees
I’m begging you please to come home
Come on home

Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
Up in my bedroom
I got up to wash my face
When I come back to bed
Someone’s taken my place

Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart
You’re shaking my confidence daily
Oh, Cecilia, I’m down on my knees
I’m begging you please to come home
Come on home

Jubilation, she loves me again,
I fall on the floor and I’m laughing,
Jubilation, she loves me again,
I fall on the floor and I’m laughing

I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was singing. (By way of contrast: last night Hank was teaching me Veggie Tales songs: “On the first day of firt grade etc. etc, on the second day of second grade etc. etc.” I wonder how long until he starts jumping around singing about making love with Cecilia in his bedroom.)

That greatest hits album was a fixture of my youth, of my adolescence, of my young adulthood. It has become a part of me.

It had never occurred to me that they had anything other than a greatest hits album. Midway through high school, during one of many Sunday afternoons spent with the Kauffman girls (one f or two, Kristin?), I stumbled upon their father’s collection of Simon and Garfunkel records. On my next trip to Tower Records, I bought copies for myself.

I can remember sitting in Mr. Sprague’s first-period chemistry class, listening to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme (still my favorite Simon and Garfunkel album) on my Walkman while doing molar equations.

At the time, my favorite Simon and Garfunkel song was “The Dangling Conversation” (though it actually seems a bit pretentious now):

The Dangling Conversation

It’s a still life water color,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtain-lace
And shadows wash the room.

And we sit and drink our coffee,
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore:
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs —
The borders of our lives.

And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert Frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost.

Like a poem poorly written,
We are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

Yes, we speak the things that matter,
With words that must be said,
“Can analysis be worthwhile?”
“Is the theater really dead?”

And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You’re a stranger now unto me—
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.

Once I was at a girlfriend’s house. Her parents were gone, and we were making out on the couch while watching public television. The Simon and Garfunkel Concert in Central Park came on and suddenly I lost interest in the girl. I was enthralled by the music. (I think the girl was actually somewhat relieved!)

My sense of nostalgia first became honed in college as I came to realize how much I missed my friends from the church youth group. When I was feeling especially wistful, I would listen to “Old Friends”:

Old Friends

Old friends.
Old friends
Sit on their park bench
Like bookends.

A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
On the high shoes
Of the old friends.

Old friends,
Winter companions,
The old men
Lost in their overcoats,
Waiting for the sunset.

The sounds of the city,
Sifting through the trees,
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends.

Can you imagine us
Years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy.

Old friends,
Memory brushes the same years.
Silently sharing the same fear—

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel went their separate ways more than thirty years ago. Though their relationship has not been nearly as fractious as the press would have us believe, their joint appearances have been infrequent and, occasionally, unhappy.

Now it seems as if the duo is ready to perform together again for an extended tour. Today they announced plans for a thirty-city tour which includes a stop in Portland.

I don’t care about the cost, I don’t care about the date: I will be at that show.

---

Ack.

Not to be outdone, Berkeley Breathed has announced plans to return to the world of comic strips with the debut of Opus on November 23rd.

The world has not been the same since Bloom County ended. Though I liked Outland some, it was a pale ghost of its predecessor. I’m even tempted to pay ten bucks to view the entire run of the original strip. (I can remember sitting in the library at Ackerman Junior High School during the fall of 1982, leafing through the first Bloom County collection with Dave Carlson and Andrew Parker and Mitch Sherrard and the rest of the geeks.)

Don’t snort the dandelions!