ERIC'S BIT or NAIL THAT TUNE
"I'm just a kid again, doing what I did again, singing a song,
When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along"
I didn't long to be a kid again when I listened to that song over and over on my grandparents' hand-cranked Victrola. I was a kid. Who didn't care much about lyrics, I guess. I suppose I liked the tune, or maybe the old fashioned crooning, warbling vocal style amused me. Was the singer Al Jolson? He did record the song but I can't picture the label on the heavy shellac '78 anymore.
My own past has served me well as a source for writing material, partly because my memory is so blurry. I am rather in the position of James Thurber in his essay The Admiral At the Wheel, in which the myopic writer sees all sorts of wonders and strange goings-on after he breaks his eye glasses. No doubt the most interesting events in my life have taken place mostly in my imagination.
Unfortunately, as you get older, it becomes harder to write about childhood without sounding like a sentimental old coot wallowing in nostalgia. At least to my ears.
Still, it is interesting to look back and try to piece things together, to try to fathom what exactly I could have been thinking while listening to another favorite '78, Listen to the Mockingbird. The mockingbird, you might recall, was singing o'er Sweet Hally's grave. There's a cheery thing to picture when you're still in grade school.
A lot of the appeal of those tunes was the antique Victrola I played them on. It was from another age, like something out of the Flintstones. Using the crank you could speed the records up until the singers sounded like the Chipmunks (or even more like the Chipmunks than they already did with their, to me, unnaturally high pitched voices) or slow the sound down to an unintelligible rumble.
The phonograph "needles" were little more than sharp steel nails. I swear that if you scraped along a groove with a nail it made a thin, ghostly noise that was not quite music but something more than the squeak of metal against shellac. Or maybe that is only in my imagination.
One thing I know for sure is that my favorite record was a lugubrious ditty about Floyd Collins. A legendary spelunker -- discoverer of Crystal Cave -- he was trapped underground while exploring. The doomed rescue effort lasted 18 days and captured the country's interest thanks to radio, which was a fairly new medium back in 1925.
Subsequent songs about the event turned out to be early radio hits, so it wasn't surprising to find an old disk which had survived, except I'd never thought of my grandparents as the sort of people who rushed out to buy the latest chart topper.
What appealed to me about the song? Was it because the faint hiss and crackle the needle scraped out of the depleted grooves sounded like an ancient radio transmission? I could have been listening to an audio time machine. I wasn't much bothered by Floyd's demise. The passing years had transmuted his tragedy into history.
Then again, let's be honest, a song about a man who died horribly in a dark, freezing cave, was more interesting than the sappy Ray Conniff love stuff my parents listened to.
Strange to think that when I listened to that recording the accident lay less than forty years in the past. Now it's been more than fifty years since I cranked that old Victrola. My childhood is buried as deep as poor Floyd.
And here I am still writing about it. At least I'm not trying to sing about it.
AND FINALLY
This has been a longer newsletter than usual, so inspired by a couple of lines from the Swan of Avon's play about Pericles let us bow to our audience and declare "New joy wait on you! Here our issue has ending".
But subscribers should not get too joyful, being as the next Orphan Scrivener will loiter into your inbox on August 15th.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, lists of author freebies and mystery-related newsletters, Doom Cat (an interactive game written by Eric), and our growing pages of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also an Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/
