Otherstream

Random thoughts for a Monday morning:

• Any Tornotoans out there? On vacation, I discovered that SunTV (channel 52) is airing King of Kensington reruns at 11:30 AM on weekdays. I remember this show from when I was a kid, and I was apparently the only person in the entire country who watched it during its brief American syndication run. Anyway, I’m dying to hear the theme song again (the vocal version from the early seasons) and would be really excited if someone could record it for me.
• Circulating hot water baseboard heat is the coolest thing in the world. There’s no blower spewing dust all over the place and drying out your skin, plus the baseboard units aren’t even hot to the touch, so it’s safe to put furniture next to them. It’s so warm and toasty.
• Road trip stats: ten states, one province, 446 still pictures, eight hours of video, $650 in car repairs, $71 in dental triage fees, $50 in Canadian antibiotics and pain pills, $30 in assorted over the counter medications at Loblaw’s, six bucks worth of Kosher Hungarian Hallowe’en candy for the neighborhood kiddies, two reunions with old friends, and a tons more fun, despite the occasional bits of drama to which I have just alluded.
• I missed the K&W, though.

As a new homeowner and a fairly new adult (despite being 42 years old), this whole switch from end user to service provider in the “trick or treat” game is so new and confusing to me. Since I never really see kids much in my neighborhood, I didn’t know how much candy to have on hand. And I’m still not sure what an appropriate disbursement per goblin actually would be.

It’s 7:22, and the doorbell has only rung three times. I may be stuck with lots of candy. That’s probably not good either.

Another bland generic apartment complex is being marketed as the hippest thing to hit Charlotte in years.

I can get past the requisite “creative class” mumbo jumbo (ground level retail space for art dealers? a climbing wall? yeah, right…) and the absurdity of the notion that one can actually build a “hip, urban village” from scratch. I can get past Doug Smith’s erroneous assumption that “shiny, brand new, and above all, dense” is synonymous with “urban”. I’m used to it. I’ve been reading his columns (not to mention sites like Urban Planet) for years.

What’s bugging me specifically about this article, though, is the fact that Doug is still using a stale, trite term like “thirtysomethings”. For god’s sake, can we please retire this hackneyed cliché and its younger sibling “twentysomethings”?

For those who don’t remember, a largely subpar TV series that went off the air about fifteen years ago is responsible for this annoying shorthand for the more digestible “people in their thirties”. You can’t find reruns of the show anymore (there’s at least some justice in the world) but the title will apparently haunt us forever.

Ten years ago when “thirtysomethings” was still being used regularly in the bar reviews of almost every magazine in the country, it was already stupid and annoying and not at all “fresh”. Today, it grates on the nerves in sort of the same way it used to horrify the Brady kids to say “groovy” in 1974, long after the rest of the world had moved on.

It must be stopped. Now.

Aunt Lucille was always one of my favorites. She was my grandmother’s sister and she was a member of of that last generation of semi-helpless and often rather silly southern ladies. But Aunt Lucille wasn’t like that. Unlike her sister and many of her contemporaries, she drove a car and had a full-time job all her life. She was independent. And she had a sense of humor, something that was also in short supply among southern women of her generation.

She was a sweetheart in every possible way. She was not overbearing; in fact, she even seemed rather humble, but she could exhibit a very refreshing sassiness from time to time as well, which I think the photo above captures. She didn’t like to moralize; she liked to laugh. I know she helped my mom through some very rough times as a little girl during the Depression, and I suspect my mom wasn’t the only family member to benefit from her presence.

Similarly, my generation of the family never dreaded being around her as we did with certain other relatives either. Aunt Lucille was firm, but she was also unfailingly upbeat and happy. She didn’t exactly “spoil” us, but neither did she spend all her time telling us what bad manners we had for not saying “yes, ma’am” in a snappy enough tone, or telling us how coddled we were. If you’re of roughly my generation and grew up in the south, I think you know what I mean here. We acted our best around her because we respected and loved her, not because we were afraid of her.

When Mark met her a few years ago, at the end of an arduous day of relative-hopping, he remarked that she seemed younger and livelier and happier than anyone he’d met that day, despite the fact that she was ten to fifteen years older than any of the rest, not to mention already in failing health. Aunt Lucille was never one to piss and moan and complain about her assorted maladies and aches and pains, even though she definitely had her share of troubles through the years.

I last spoke to her on Thursday. She asked about Mark and about the new house, and told me she loved me. When I saw her again on Saturday, she wasn’t talking anymore, but she still held my hand.

Aunt Lucille died this morning at 8:30. She was 89. I’m going to miss her quite a lot.