Retro Y'all!

Thoughts to ponder this Memorial Weekend. 



Emmylou Harris has an incredible cover of this one.  I'd love to here to two of them do it as a duet.  That would be awesome.

One of the very first things Keith and I bonded over was a mutual love of Tracy Chapman.  One day, I cut a pic of her out of Rolling Stone and taped it to his door with a little note that said something like "Hey Keith!  Stopped by to see you.  Sorry I missed you.  Love, Tracy."

In 1989, we were bus captains to the Housing Now! March in Washington, DC.  That was my first ever major national protest march.  It was kind of a heady weekend.  We rode the buss all night, got out, marched, got back on the bus and drove all night back to Louisville.

The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was on display at the same time, so we snuck off to see it for a little while.  It was our first time seeing a large scale display of the quilt, and I remember how overwhelming it all was.

I ran into some friends from college there, which was cool.  One of the last things that happened at the main platform before our group had to leave to re-board the buses was Tracy Chapman performing.  It kind of made the whole weekend for us.

Stay safe this weekend folks!  I'm planning to chill and watch anime all weekend.

Happy Birthday Dad

Today would have been my dad's 85th birthday.  That seems like a lot to me.  In June, he'll have been gone ten years.  That seems like a lot too.  Life is passing by too damn fast, you know.

I don't write a lot about him, because we really weren't as close as my mom and I were.  He was stationed overseas a lot while I was growing up, so we saw him just a few times a year.  Then when he retired from the Army, my parents divorced soon after.  There are a lot of memories associated with that time that I don't like to dwell on, and most of them relate to him.  It took me years to work past all that.

I'm glad I was able to do that.  I know too many people who are still screwed up from their relationships with dead parents that now can't be fixed.  What I have discovered over the years is some really nice memories buried under all the rotten ones.  Those are the ones I want to remember.

I think of my mom whenever I hear certain Johnny Cash songs, because she liked them and sang them a lot.  I think of my dad whenever I hear any Johnny Cash song, because he was the one that made me a Johnny Cash fan.  (He's also the one the really jump-started my comic book collection.  An awful lot of those things that make me me are due to him.  I've only recently started to realize this.)

When I was in 7th and 8th grade, I spent a lot of time trying to have surgery.  I know that sounds kind of weird, but I was scheduled for a procedure that I needed several times, but it kept getting postponed. The first time it got postponed because I was sick.  We did go to the hospital, but they wouldn't admit me for the procedure.  I can't remember why it didn't happen the second time.  I think it might have been due to my bloodwork, because I do remember getting that far.  I also remember feeling kind of bad that time, because Dad was in Germany by then, and he came all the way back home for the surgery.  I was also very embarrassed at school, because for the second time, I had told everyone I was going to be out for about three weeks and collected homework and everything.

When the surgery finally happened, he came back again from Germany.  If I'm remembering right, he got there after the procedure had been one, but was there to take me home.  He had brought me some comics (of course), but also something else:  an 8-track tape player!  And a box of tapes!  (I think I just dated myself there...)

It was a mixed bag of tapes.  I really didn't have much of a developed taste in music at that point.  I think the story goes that someone owed my dad money and gave him the player and tapes to pay off the debt.  The ones that I remember the best (and that I probably played the most) were several by Johnny Cash, two from the Beach Boys, and a home recording of Linda Ronstadt's greatest hits.  (I'm going to be doing a long post on her soon.)

I had that tape player for a long while.  My first copy of the much beloved Grease soundtrack was on 8-track.  I don't know whatever happened to it or the tapes, but I remember laying in bed during my three week recovery period and listening to them over and over.

The other day, I was messing around on YouTube (like always) and found this Roseanne Cash song.  She recorded it with her father right before he died.  That got me to thinking about Johnny Cash, then about my dad.  Then I remembered that his birthday was coming up and knew that I wanted to use it in a post about him.



Another song with a Cash connection that makes me think of Dad is this one.  It's one Cash recorded as part of The Highwaymen.



The song was written by Guy Clark and makes me think about my dad whenever I hear it.  When he was in the hospital before he died, Keith and I had tickets to see Guy Clark in Nashville.  My brother agreed to stay with Dad so we could go.  He always plays this song as it is one of his better known.  When they got to the part about "the son of a bitch is coming" (that's the original line) I burst into tears.  I've had a hard time listening to it ever since.  My dad died six weeks later.

Happy Birthday, Dad.  We miss you a lot. 

Looking Back

Happy 2014, everyone!  It's too early to tell what the year will hold, of course, but I can say with all certainty that I'm starting the year out in a better place than I was this time last year.  It's definitely better to be up and around on New Year's Eve than it is to be in a hospital, even if you aren't a big party person.  (I'm not.)

One last super-huge thank you to all of you for playing such a huge role in my recovery.  You can never know how much your emails and comments meant to me.  This blog helped me keep my sanity during a tough time.  I'm glad I had you all to share it with.

I guess I'll never be able to look at 2013 without remembering all the chemo, needles, nausea and such, but other things happened too:

I expanded my booth in one store and made the hard decision to close out at another venue.
I took a road trip and ended up engaged!
My grandfather passed away.
I got a storage space for some of this junk.
Both our vehicles got totaled in front of our house.  (I need to fill you all in on the resolution to that little saga.)
I bought lots of junk.  I sold some of it.
I started a Secret Project, which will be revealed very soon.
I made a friend.
I laid a festering former friendship to rest for good.
I met a junking celebrity.
I got new glasses!  And a haircut!  And older!
And I finally made it to 1,000 posts!

 And that, as they say, was the year that was.  I have some things to say about the year just starting, but they'll have to wait for another time.  I have a Secret Project to attend to.

What's in a Name?

This is my 1000th post, something I never thought I would reach.  It's only taken ten years to get her, after all!  In honor of that, I wanted to do something a little more personal.  I hope you enjoy it.

My full name is Michael Edward Mitchell.  Some of you all already know that, as I have used it a few times here on the blog.  I've been "Eddie" derived from the "Edward" part for my whole life, however.  It's what I was meant to be called.  Never "Mike" or even "Michael."

When my mom was nearly a teenager, her youngest brother, my uncle Mike, was born.  Since both of my grandparents worked, and it was the fifties, Mom usually had to take care of him.  The story goes that she decided during these times that she would name her first boy "Michael" after him.  And so I became a namesake.

The middle name thing came along later.  Mom said that she wanted at first to name me "Michael Andrew."  The reason she didn't was because she didn't like the name "Andy."  Since there was already one Mike in the family, she didn't want to call me by that name, so she needed a workable middle name.  Rather than "Andy" she would have called me "Drew."  She eventually decided that it was going to be hard enough to get people used to using my middle name.  A less common nick name from that middle name might even be more problematic, so she scrapped the idea and went with "Edward."

She said it was just a name she liked, but we found out years later that my great-grandmother had a brother named Edward, so it's actually a family name.  If had been a girl, I would have been "Sara Dorine," two more family names--Dorine was my grandmother's name.  Mom always said that she was so sure that she was carrying a boy that she referred to me as "Eddie" just about from the moment she found out that she was pregnant.

My uncle Mike was a teenager when I was born.  We've talked a lot about how we share some of the same memories of my grandparents in ways that are different from everyone else, because we were both kids.  He was one of my first heroes when I was very young.  I loved for him to pick me up and play with me.  One of the good things that came out of my mother's passing is that we have gotten to be close again.  He lives across the river from me, and we both have booths in the same Peddlers Mall.  We get together and share stories about junk and go junking and stuff.  It's pretty cool.

As far as I was concerned, my name was "Eddie."  I never found out about this "Michael" thing until I was in first grade.  There I was sitting in the gym with my mom and all the other kids and their parents.  They were calling off names, and kids were going off with teachers.  They called this "Michael Mitchell" dude, and my mother gets up and starts walking away!  WHAT??  She finally turns to me and says:  "That's you.  Come on."  An identity crisis at 5 years old.  How cruel is that?

I had a running battle with my name for years after that.  I just wanted to be "Eddie."  But on the first day of school every year, I was "Michael."  Every time I went to the doctor, I was "Michael."  Worse yet was when people would take shortcuts and just assume they could call me "Mike" because of the "Michael" part.  That's. Not. My. Name.

My biggest problem with "Michael" was that I could not spell it correctly.  For years, I got it wrong, prompting my mother to fuss and bemoan my illiteracy.  I could do fifth grade math in the third grade, but I could not spell my own name.  Where had she failed?  It didn't help things much when I would try to point out that from my point of view, my name was "Eddie" and it would be so much simpler if everyone just got used to that.  Then I would get the story about where my name comes from.

Somewhere around the sixth grade, I figured out that if I spelled "Michael" correctly, when I looked at it backwards, the first four letters would spell "Leah."  Don't ask me how I came up with that, but it worked.

When I graduated high school and saw my name printed out on my cards, I had a revelation about how cool my name actually is.  Look at it:

Michael Edward Mitchell

It's wonderfully symmetrical.  You can draw a line right through the middle of it, and the are the same number of letters on either side.  The first and last name are derivations of each other, so the sort of mirror each other.  They have the same number of letters and start and end with the same letter.  It really is pretty cool.  It sounds awesome when it's all called out, too.

Since college, I've toyed around with using various versions of my name.  I did "M. Edward" for a while.  That's even still my official signature.  I tried "M.E." and also "Michael Edward" which I liked because it sounds really pretentious.  In fact, whenever I get business cards, I put the whole thing on there.

In every day life, I'm pretty content to be just plain ole "Eddie."  It fits.  But never "Ed."  The only two people who ever called me that are both gone now.  It's kind of reserved for their use.  I've stopped fighting the "Michael" thing and will come meekly when called.  I do, however, make every attempt to squeeze my whole middle name in when filling out forms, no matter how few spaces they give for the middle initial.  Sometimes, the broader culture needs reminding that the first name is not always the "default" name.