Good-bye Starman

Click here for some music to set the tone for this blog.

Yesterday, it rained all day. I went to work in the rain. Came home in the rain.  Took a nap in the rain and woke up listening to the rain on my roof. 

I didn't realize the skies were crying. 

Suddenly, my son came in, knowing it was perfectly okay to wake me up for a rainbow. And what a brilliant one it was.  Little did I know, it was the most elegant chameleon saying good-bye. 

The first song I ever heard by David Bowie was when someone performed "Changes" in a talent show during my Freshman year of High School.  I thought 2 things.  She's great... how come we didn't know this girl could sing all through middle school?  And WHERE DID THIS SONG COME FROM??? Back then you didn't look it up on iTunes, or Google it.  I asked her afterwards, and she told me it was David Bowie.  I went and got the 45 immediately. 

I first heard David Bowie live in concert in 1975.  He was touring to promote the "Young Americans" album, which I didn't even own yet. But the songs were getting a lot of airplay, and when a group of kids at school asked if I wanted to go to Madison Square Garden, I had only been there once before, and it was all very exciting.   My crush on the way in to NYC  became my boyfriend on the way home.  I realized there was more to life than "Just and Old Fashioned Love Song*." My parents had let me go into New York City with my friends, I made it home alive, and I grew up a little that night.

My musical horizons were opening.  Billy Joel and Beach Boys were giving way to the The Who, Paul McCartney's solo stuff, and I was even  re-discovering the Beatles, as people tend to do when they get a really good pair of headphones for the first time. 

But then, in 1976, along came David Bowie's Station to Station Album. 

When he came back to play  at  MSG, I was the one who said to my friends that we should buy tickets.  My boyfriend was already moving on to the next big thing, which I believe was Peter Frampton at our high school.  But we went to the concert.  And I was transfixed.  Transformed.  If you don't know this album, play it (like an album, please, in order).  

I understood "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," and "God Only Knows What I'd be Without You."  Yes, of course. These made sense to a fifteen year old.  But "Wild is the Wind?" WHOA.  Love isn't simple. Love is messy.  Love is complicated.  David Bowie was talking about something I was just on the verge of understanding. (I was, after all, now a sixteen-year-old.)

On the bus ride home, my boyfriend said, "You know, he likes girls AND boys."  I did know that, and said something like, "So?"  I remember my boyfriend looking at me with a mixture of disgust and incredulity.

Not long after that we were in his car and I found the hand cream of another girl.  Even at the tender age of 16 love was messy and complicated. 

I went home and played Station to Station with my headphones on.   In fact, as the melodramatic teen-aged girl that I was, I repeated this ritual every single day.  I still can't hear TVC15 without thinking of Jim** and my newly broken heart. 

David Bowie didn't come out in platform shoes during those shows. He didn't wear make-up or an extreme haircut.  He had on a stylish suit and sang songs that touched my soul.  I remember saying even then to probably no one that he was ahead of his time.

His music has had the power to make me feel: happy, sad, energized, strengthened.  With words I understood, but concepts I sometimes had to struggle with.  Different genres on a single album.  Superior musicianship, and outstanding partnerships.  And of course, excellent showmanship.  Just three days ago, on his birthday, I watched a special called Storytellers, where David Bowie told the tales behind some of his most popular songs, and some obscure ones as well.  It was a delight.  As I watched, I wondered, not for the first time in the last year, why he's been so quiet.

The outpouring of love for him on social media is heartwarming.  I know I for one will miss him always.  And will always consider him my first grown-up love.

Good-bye Starman.

*A classic by 3 Dog Night, and not a bad song.  Just wildly over-played at the time. Click here to hear it.  Or don't.
**Jim was not his real name.  
Click here to get to the New York Times article and obituary.

Thank you to Adam Barr, my brother-in-law, for posting this and giving me a real laugh...David Bowie shows his humorous side...
Click here to end with a laugh.

Barr Family Reunion

I arrived at #5 Seabreeze last Saturday in my shiny red Prius cranking "Little Deuce Coup" with my 26 year-old son in the passenger seat.  We were the last to arrive actually and squeezed the tiny car into the last remaining spot, bounded out of my tightly packed car to welcoming arms.  Literally.  Hugs and kisses, smiles and laughter greeted us.  Even from those we had seen just yesterday.

It's the Barr Family reunion at Old Orchard Beach.  We wouldn't miss it for anything. And except for 2 summers, we haven't missed it in something like 32 years.  (I'll be happy to correct that number, but I am pretty sure that's about right.)  My in-laws and their four sons, their wives, and kids have all gotten together on this beautiful beach for a week at the end of July or beginning of August.  What we have is uniquely ours and incredibly special.  We've shared more laughs and yes, some tears, than most families do.  We repeat the same stories, and they are still funny. AND they're becoming the kids' stories now!

It's Friday afternoon, and our week here is coming to an end.  A few of the family members have left already.  We're doing laundry and eating up the leftovers today.  About an hour ago we said good-bye to the youngest member, sweet cousin Zoe, just two now. As she waved bye-bye to Nana, clutching her Cookie Monster doll and talking about eating "sushi at the airport" we all tried to smile, but it was not so easy when we saw the tears in Nana's eyes.

We will have one more family dinner tonight and maybe walk down to the pier for ice cream if it doesn't rain.  We will all pack up our cars and suitcases, and spend the next few weeks emailing and facebooking our memories and photos back and forth.  But the bigger picture is the imprint that this ritual has made on our lives, not that we did it this year, but that we've been doing this every year.

We taught our children that no matter how busy we were, this week was the most important week of the year.  We came to Maine right after babies were born, or when babies were soon to be born!  We came to Maine instead of going on a honeymoon! (And by the way, Michael, I would like to remind you that you still owe me a romantic get-away...)  We went to Maine when we had very little money to spend on any other vacation.  And we came up here when I had just finished my cancer treatments.  I did not even know yet if I was cancer free, and I was very weak and tired.  But I did know that I wanted to be surrounded by family, and love, and lots of energetic children.

Since I am writing this blog from the kitchen table of the beach house and not from my desk at home, I can't post lots of photos from the last 30 plus years, but please use your imagination.  Picture toddlers playing in the sand.  Little children laughing on kiddie rides at the pier.  Shots of sand castles that all look alike even though every year we exclaim, "THIS is our best one EVER!!"  And all of us laughing over cheese and crackers during cocktail hour.  The inevitable lobster fest, with my brother-in-law and me listening to Sugar Magnolia as we crack open the leftovers for lobster rolls the next day.

And then picture me again, not aging a bit of course, with the biggest smile on my face, wishing it would never end.

Good -bye for this year, Old Orchard Beach, and beloved extended Barr Family.  I'll see you all again next year, and I'll miss you until then.

I'll try to add more photos to this blog as I download them from my camera.  

Post script: as I finished writing this, and family returned from various outings, I posted the blog...asked for feedback, got a hug from my sister-in-law, and threats not to post any pix that were unflattering of anyone! A few minutes later, cousin Debbie, who actually lives here, came to say good-bye, with a fresh baked challah. With that I took out the Shabbat candles, and my brother-in-law got the last and best bottle of red wine, and we welcomed Shabbat as a family. 

The cars a loaded now and I have to go. But I just thought you'd like to know. 

August 2014:

I sat down to write about this summer at the beach, and I realized I had written these thoughts before. So instead, I'll repost, with a few additional thoughts after another great week!

Tradition!
As I mentioned above, we calculated that we have been coming to Old Orchard Beach for 32 years now.  We have only missed two summers in all that time.  Some of them stand out.  The summer after my husband and I got married (actually it was the week after we got married) we earned the only room with a double bed.  It was, after all our honeymoon.  (How many of you took your honeymoon with your in-laws, three brothers, two sisters-in law, and a baby nephew?)  One summer we rented a house where the walls didn't go all the way up to the ceiling, so you could hear absolutely everything everyone said in the house.  That was neat. There was the summer it was so unbearably hot, no one could sleep. And the summer it was freezing cold the entire time ... oh wait, that's every summer. 
Some things have changed.  No more buckets of toys, and boxes of videos.  And crates of cassettes tapes. I still ambitiously bring three books, this year I nearly finished one, which is a record for me lately.  Gameboys have given way to iPods and iPads.  My mother-in-law has finally allowed us all to participate in the kitchen so she can sit and relax and enjoy the company.

Three generations in the kitchen. 

The House Itself

First, let me say it's really quite a little house.

I posed the house next to my Prius to give you perspective.  Inside we sleep 9 or 10 adults.  We used to fit more of us, but at a certain point people started to care about little things like privacy, sleeping past 6:30 am, and having hot water for showers. So some of the grown kids opt for the hotel down the street.
It's decorated in "down the shore decor" of timeless lime green and sea foam blue that we really have gotten used to by now. What hit me a few years ago what that the photos of the owners children are still the same baby pictures as when we started renting this house 8 or 9 years ago.  I wonder what would happen if I surreptitiously replaced those outdated photos with our family photos.  (Here we have Uncle Ronald, eating a lobster.  Here we have Aunt Jean, working on a jigsaw puzzle...  all in those dorky tiny nautical frames they have all over the living room.  You get the idea.)


The Salami
A few years ago, when one brother couldn't make it, he sent a deli salami from LA to our beach house. My father-in-law got very excited about this, and missed several beach days, sitting in the driveway on his beach chair waiting for the UPS truck to come for this hard salami delivery.  No once can deny it was delicious.
The next year, the prodigal brother came to the beach with two salamis in tow.  And they were devoured.  But the following year, I guess he got busy, and forgot.  And I do believe that was the year my father-in-law stopped smiling, and the weather turned bad, and the kids got cranky, and well, things just weren't right.  So, I am now the provider of the salami.  I order two of those bad boys from Katz's Deli in NYC, have them delivered to my house, where I bring my lawn chair out to my driveway and wait for them to arrive.  This year the second one made it almost until our last day of vacation.

The Family Portraits

I could not get my father-in-law to smile, or even look at the camera, to the delight of his sons.

Three blessed kids, with their parents and both sets of grandparents. Aug 1, 2014. Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

The Cousins!  We are missing a few this year, and truly hope they make it next summer!
Photo credit: Vicki Barr

1983- do you like the leg kick? Or Adam's photobomb?

I guess we went out for dinner.  Once. Also, 1983,

2010

1996 - the first year we started taking this kind of photo

It's Just A Box of Tapes

You and Me, iPod!

I have been involved in a love affair.


It began in 2003, on Valentines Day.  And it continues to this day...


This is sounding cliche, and wait, because it gets worse.  My husband is responsible for introducing us.


He bought me my first iPod with his first bonus check from a then-new job, and I have never looked back.


This did not start my love affair with the recorded song, of course.
My first records, two 45's,were given to me with my first record player when I was 6 by my parents.  I remember vividly sitting right down on the kitchen floor in our little house in Sacramento, California, and playing "Heroes and Villains" by the Beach Boys and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles over and over again.  These were the brand new hits (1967) and being played on every radio station in America.

A small sampling of my wonderful collection of 45's.
I'm waiting til we get a Jukebox for the billiards room.
I'm waiting til we get a billiards room.

When I hit middle school, I would save my allowance and babysitting money to buy records.

My  record collection was expanding, and now technology had really taken off.  Cassette tapes!



I never was one for buying pre-recorded tapes, but I quickly realized the joy of making a mixed-tape.  Every new car had a cassette player ... (or an eight track, but I seemed to skip that whole genre somehow).


When my boyfriend got his license I made him a tape for his car. Car songs, mixed with my favorite songs to hear while riding in a car.  I'm sure he never played it.  My creativity was bursting.  When my friend moved to Chicago, I made her a poignant tape of songs about being friends, imaging how she'd cry when she heard it.


Headed down the Jersey shore?  I made the "perfect" mix of classics by the Beach Boys, Steve Miller Band, the Beatles, SuperTramp, Kansas, Foreigner, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, and the Who, with a few of the radio's top hits mixed in to get us down there and back.


What started as a few tapes for a car ride, however, morphed into a shoe-box of tapes for longer rides. By the time I was in college, my record and tape collection was still modest compared to what it is now, but it all had to come with me.

American Beauty...A New Reality?

And then came the spiritual awakening  known to many as American Beauty.*


Can a record album be life changing?


Yes.


(You know this scene in Freaks and Geeks?  Yeah.  Like that.)


Once I got on the bus**, my music collection took a weird and wonderful turn.  My record catalog doubled, my tape collection grew exponentially. I no longer stuck to one favorite radio station. I began to search to the origins of blues, soul and country music and had to discover the roots of everything.  At parties I'd gravitate to where the music was.  Soon I was travelling with a wooden crate of tapes just to get back and forth from Boston to New Jersey for breaks.


  When my friend Patti was going on a road trip I made her a tape (Life in the Fast Lane by the Eagles and Helen Hell on Wheels by Wings).  There were party tapes and mellow tapes.   All my mixed tapes took a psychedelic turn as my musical tastes did as well.  Jefferson Airplane, It's a Beautiful Day, Blind Faith, lots of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Cliff joined the Grateful Dead on the lovely montages I was putting together with still contained classics like the Eagles, Elton John, Chicago and Paul McCartney's solo stuff.  I had dreams of becoming a radio DJ and playing what I thought were perfect mixes of music, getting lost for hours in my own record collection. 



  And then, there were the Grateful Dead live tapes.


  One of the more remarkable and outstanding things about the Grateful Dead is, and always has, been their generosity with their music.  They have allowed and encouraged taping of their live shows, and these tapes used to be traded around, mostly for free or for a blank tape.  If you attended a concert that you loved, you'd make a few calls and try to find a good version of that tape, so you could hear it over and over. (The sharing of the music continues, by the way.  It is now done online, by those "tapers," who upload their shows, with the generous permission of the band.)


I'd hunt down rare versions of singles and live versions of concerts.  Did Jerry Garcia actually make a little joke at Bob Weir's expense in Buffalo?  I had to have that tape! The Blues Brothers joined the Dead for the closing of the venerable Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco? I needed the soundboard this time, not an audience version!

I did go to class, in case you were wondering.  By this time, the Walkman was invented!  So wonderfully small, you could take this thing everywhere and bring your music with you!

The Walkman, next to an iPod shuffle, in my hand.

After college, I married my boyfriend, and we decided to make San Francisco our home. He understood my music addiction and was okay with it.  That drive required a new dimension of tape toting.  All the tapes fit snuggly into a wooden crate, re-purposed from a wine crate, that had a rope handle.  Well, let me be honest here.  The tapes fit into three of these.  And these were just the tapes I chose for the car ride across the country.  The rest were packed into boxes and I prayed they stayed safe and dry on their trip.

One of the boxes of tapes.

When CD's started to become popular in the late 80's I was cautious, but excited.  Recorded music that doesn't get warped, scratched, melted, or tangled up in the player? And the sound quality is better than anything yet? Of course I had to try it.  The last records I remember buying were Paul Simon's Graceland (1986) and the The Traveling Wilburys (1988).  We did not have the technology to burn CD's yet, nor did we have a CD player in our car or van, so we pretty much stuck with records and tapes for quite a while, while slowly adding CD's to our collection.


Lets just say that if they had not come up with the iPod when they did, I might have qualified for a role on that show called "Hoarders."


Now, don't get me wrong, I still have all the tapes, CD's and records.  I still buy a new CD every so often.  But when I want ONE song off one album?  Or I have the record already and I just need it digitally? I am thrilled to save the room and click "buy" from iTunes.  I can even do it right from my phone when the muse hits me waiting online at Shoprite.  (Come on, haven't you ever heard the Muzak version of Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum and needed the original immediately?)


My latest download was, like many people, a Monkees compilation, to round out my iTunes catalog and join the world in mourning the death of the cutest Monkee, Davy Jones.  My favorite download lately?  I guess the one I've played the most is Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood at Madison Square Garden. It amazes and delights me that I can now carry all my music, create moods, cheer myself up, and quickly "name that tune," all with this one magical perfect little device.


Well, two little devices.  My iPhone doesn't quite hold enough music, so I still cart around my iPod as well, because, well, you just never know which of the 4,500 songs you might need at any given moment.  The good news is they all fit in my pocketbook!

True love 4ever.

NOTE: I guess a blog post about my love of my iPod would not be complete without a playlist to accompany it.  So,  if you'll notice some of the songs are highlighted, so they are clickable links.  They should lead you to YouTube links of songs to listen to as your read about my somewhat abbreviated journey through the recorded song.

*You know, man, that if you look at the lettering just right, dude, it also says... American Reality. WHOA.

**Became a fan of the Grateful Dead

New note:  This iPod has since actually died, may it's memory be for a blessing.  I am now, somewhat dubiously, in the cloud, trusting my catalog to the people at Apple.  We will see how that goes for one year.