Ambivalent
BSB Addict
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2009
- Posts
- 1,811
- Reaction score
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Jon ~
I should be happy to leave you MINE.
From the ages of three to sixteen, when I went off to the university, I went to visit my Grandmother every evening after I finished feeding my 800 pigs, as she had a tiny house in our farmyard.
The routine was always thus:
1.) Readings (my reading/declaiming to her, with her correcting me from her capacious and invariably correct, memory; and sound elocutionary skills) of: passages from the Authorized Version; Shakespeare; Milton; Coleridge; or, Wordsworth. (She loved Wordsworth, I hated him. And still rather dislike him; though I have mellowed.)
2.) A great symphony, or portions of ( usually pretty conventional and famous) operas.
3.) A break. And a little chatter about how school, and public-speaking competitions were going.
4.) Then, milk and marshmallow cookies coated in chocolate (I don't know if they have those in the U.K., but they were famous here, in that day - I don't know if they are even available HERE any longer): and a couple of "light classics" or silly popular songs, played by Liberace. (I think my Grandmother had a little crush, on "Lee".)
Many years later, my (lovely) Dad said to me, a little wistfully: "'A', how lucky you were: when I was a boy, we were all working SO HARD, on the farm. . . you got the chance to know my Mother much BETTER than I DID."
And, secondly (and in a tone parti-coloured with mock and REAL HORROR) he ALSO SAID, "MY MOTHER got you to love LIBERACE? How DARE she have done that!" (Then, he laughed.)
Of course, a guilty, and silly, and ironic pleasure, Jon, borne of nostalgia for childhood. But. . . I honestly WILL leave you those albums in my will. . . if you want ;-))) *You may always say "yes", but if you don't want them, you'd better just be SILENT, and I will hold nothing against you - but this is a beloved, silly, memory of MY GAY CHILDHOOD. All these songs were so tacky, and silly - but they ALWAYS, still, make me smile.
Love, your friend,
"A" XOXOXOXOXOXOXO
P.S. This is a number which always made my first, great, lost b/f from uni, HOWL. (He improvised filthy lyrics around the word "cement", which one needn't be a GENIUS, to surmise.)
