"I hope you don't mind that I put down in words
how wonderful Life is while you're in the world."
-- Bernie Taupin
Warmth like an old sun
radiating through my skin
way deep into the place
where my Grammaw used to be:
strawberry cheesecake
ice-cream and TV re-runs
an old Electrolux sewing
machine with a hundred
colored spools of cotton
thread and two silver thimbles
that used to be her mother's
and hers before that.
You say I'm a turncoat?
A woman who'll argue both sides
of the issue? Wearing your
sweater, I am a girl again,
enclosed in the comfort of
a Grammaw's long hug and hot
cocoa snow winters, the mornings
in front of an old radio
waiting to hear no school
so we could play cards all day
and make pork chop rice casserole.
We should have made pies together.
We should have played canasta
while the cookies baked and
the bread dough rised.
Your grammar is as perfect
as a circle O. I loosen the stop
behind fragments and the sentence
becomes a journey toward no end
we'd ever anticipate.
In your sweater, I wait
for the coffee to perk, the doorbell
to ring your arrival with a tin
of cookies and Monopoly.
In your sweater, I'll live
an embrace not gotten, nor had,
my missing you an abstraction
I couldn't ever quite define,
but more literal than words
could ever say.
Bernie Taupin, lyricist, poet, singer, was best known for his long-term (over 30 albums) collaboration with Elton John, writing the lyrics for the majority of his songs, including "Your Song." At 15 Taupin had left school to work briefly as a trainee in the print room of a newspaper and then had a number of part-time jobs. In 1967 the 17-year-old Taupin and the 20-year-old musician, then still known as Reginald Dwight, both answered a Liberty Records ad for new songwriters that appeared in "New Musical Express." Neither passed the audition, but A&R man Ray Williams put them in touch with each other. Their normal method of collaboration was that Taupin would write the words and John would set them to music, with no further interaction, though in later years Taupin would sometimes join John in the studio as the songs were composed and occasionally even during recording sessions.
ReplyDeleteAB Electrolux was a Swedish maker of home appliances, especially vacuum cleaners. In 1919 Svenska Elektron AB acquired Elektromekaniska AB, becoming Elektrolux (the spelling changed in 1957). In North America, the "Electrolux" name was used by Aerus LLC, originally established to sell the Swedish firm's goods.
Canasta (Spanish for "basket") is a card game of the rummy family of games, usually played with two standard "French decks" of 52 playing cards plus the four Jokers by two pairs of partners sitting opposite from each other, though variations for two, three, five or six players also exist. Players attempt to make melds of seven cards of the same rank and "go out" by playing all cards in their hand. It was devised by Segundo Santos and Alberto Serrato in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1939, and spread quickly (and was modified) in Latin America in the 1940s. In 1948 Ottilie H. Reilly introduced it to the US as "Argentine rummy" and it paying it became a fad in the 1950s.
Monopoly is a board game published by Parker Brothers in 1935. Subtitled "The Fast-Dealing Property Trading Game,"the game refers to the domination of a market by a single entity. Players move around the game-board buying, trading, or selling properties, developing their properties with houses and hotels, and collecting rent from their opponents, with the goal of driving them all into bankruptcy, leaving one monopolist in control of the economy. It is now owned and produced by the American game and toy company Hasbro.