We return you to your regularly scheduled blogs (now expanded)

Aie. I've been a bad blogger. OK, I've a lot to post. But if you're reading this around 7 p.m.ish - then you're only getting this for now.



ETA: (Around 3 a.m. for those counting. ;P) So, some bits, sans pictures, sadly.

Goodbye Glorielle, Bonjour Bella. So, since Glorielle (my old white car) failed inspection and since it was really about time and since I'm commuting to Boston, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new (old) car. Her name is Bella, she's (naturally) Bellwether blue, she has a CD player (that works!), she drives well although she needs some work, she has been to and from Boston a few times now and we get along splendidly. She got her name on the drive back from the fellow we bought her from. I had made a mix CD - very hastily, very very badly mixed - for the drive back, among which tracks was the opening song from Beauty and the Beast. And so between singing loudly, "Oh, isn't it amazing?/It's my favorite part because.../You'll see!" and her color, Belle was named.

But what to do with Glorielle? I admit that I've had a very difficult time giving her up. It isn't so much that she's a wonderful car. Lord help me, but she isn't. And never was. And it isn't (if I'm to become drearily practical) that I loved her - that is, a car - so much. But rather, she was my first car. I've had her since I began teaching. I bought her so I could drive to my schools. She represents, in many ways, a chapter of my life. My first car; my first career; my first fumbling steps away from college and - ultimately - back again.

In her, Jules and I found a hundred backroads in Massachusetts. We sang songs and had long talks and were silent and simply thought near one another. She's seen me through two very unpleasant endings with schools. I drove her around and around and screamed until I thought I'd shattered all the sounds in the world within her thin walls when I left those schools. I cried for close to an hour once, after Hamlet, when I first felt the end of all things. I couldn't go inside the house. But I could stay inside Glorielle.

Glorielle who drove on a wing and a prayer and special Guardian Angel mechanics who kept her together when all human reason and laws of physics should have killed her long ago. Glorielle whose meagre tape recorder exploded one day literally in a puff of smoke (not unlike famous chickens with fireworks in their stomachs). Glorielle whose lack of music made music.

I remember, in August of 2005, jumping in her after an all-night session, finishing King of Fools driving her out to Barnes and Noble in Framingham, sitting in the Starbucks Cafe there for several hours and composing, writing, frantically frantically, and then about noon hopping back in Glorielle where all the blocks just fell away and I wrote the words of the final song - singing and singing, and passing through forest and over water and letting the beauty of the finale fill my mind several months before it ever became reality. It was reality already within my little Glorielle.

And I remember composing Bearskin in her. And all the silly songs I made up to alternately delight and frustrate Peter: "My Camel is a Film Projector" "The Lemming Song" "Lawn Ornament Lady" "Disco at the Stoplight" "Beige" and of course the ever popular "Peter Will Play Pokemon (Until They Drag Him Home)."

And when Jules talked me into driving her down to King Richard's Faire, only to find it rained out, and my poor little car wheezing her way in the rain down the highways and byways. And how I couldn't go anywhere in her without being recognized. And waved at. And honked at. And made me, therefore, go the speed limit. And how often I would pull into a tight space and declare, "See how deftly I did that?! Deft! Deft!"

And so, yes, it was difficult - very, very difficult to give her up. Awful. It was awful enough to take her license plates. They'd been on so long, the imprint of the letters was left on her side. The night before she had to be off the road, I took her out, just she and I, to see the roads she had shown me one last time. And I sang in her. And the next night, her last night on the road, I begged Julie to go with me once more, to drive one last time in her. And we sang to her. And we sang songs we had learned in her to her. And it was very difficult.

And Monday, Daddy emptied out the trunk for me - the trunk still full of, what else?, theatre things. Brigadoon lighting cues and glass mugs, Kiss Me, Kate posters, Twelfth Night treasure chest, Wizard of Oz straw hat, Midsummer's birch border. And yesterday, after coming back from class, we put on one license plate and drove her down to some awful auto parts shop for whatever they would give us for her and I sang to her one last time. And I sang "Eidelweiss," because I couldn't think of what else to sing to her.

Eidelweiss, eidelweiss,
Every morning you greet me
Small and white
Clean and bright
You look happy to meet me

Blossom of snow
May you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow
Forever

Eidelweiss, eidelweiss
Bless my homeland
Forever.

And yes, I cried. We brought her in. We signed the title. We received our thirty pieces of silver. Dad gave his keys. I couldn't give mine. Dad went out, in the snow and rain and mist and took her last dignity from her - stripped her of her plate. And we left her there. Small, alone. Done. Complete. Forlorn.

Memories for sale. Dreams to be sorted. A self to be scrapped.

It really, really is all over. It is done. And there is never, really, any returning.

And yes, I cried and I cried. Because it all hurts. More than songs can say.

Her name, I know now, was never Glorielle. She had a secret name. I once lived in an Eidelweiss.

~*~

Sign-offs no. 1
Mood: Enchanted tonight!
Music: Mental "One Boy" from Bye, Bye Birdie!
Thought: Dinner. That should be had, I think.

~*~

Sign-offs no. 2
Mood: Hurt-ed, Wendy. And no soap will make my shadow stick again.
Music: "Across the Universe" as sung by Rufus Wainwright
Thought: The lyrics, "Nothing's gonna change my world." Like Clara -

Wishes, dreams and visions,
Fancies fade to grown decisions;
Stories stay within their pages
Hope's abandoned by the ages.

Could time now be shattered?
If tonight were all that mattered.
Stop the clocks, if you're clever -
Stay inside this night forever.