Living in a hotel for the past 163 days has been both challenging and fun. We were displaced because of a 50-cent plastic fixture in a toilet that chose to bust while we were two thousand or more miles away selecting a home for, hopefully, the rest of our years together as a couple. So, "the best laid plans of mice and men," according to the wag / poet Robert Burns, is a fitting motif for our last five months.
I don't know if it was supposed to happen, but it did, so therefore - yes - it was supposed to happen. Unless we'd had the wisdom to replace it with a better fixture, which our plumber had recommended. (However, to Linda's and my credit, our plumber ALWAYS recommended we part with more of our money every time they'd paid us biannual visits to "check" our heating and plumbing systems and what not. (By the way, for the sake of full disclosure, I - Patrick Rowlee - being of semi-sound mind do hereby claim [not swear] that in my 65-and-counting years of breathing and writing, I have NEVER utilized the oft-forgotten countryism known as "what-not." So, rest assured, it won't become a regular or even irregular habit, so help me Universe (because I won't swear to Him; I did enough of that before I got hip to Him being omniscient and omnipresent and everlasting since always).
So, this is my first-ever blog in which I haven't selected a topic, but took the easy road in calling it my "ramblings."
What are ramblings anyway? "Ramblings" is a word regularly applying to someone's speech or writing that appears to be willy-nilly in manner with no beginning, middle, or end. In other, plainer words, it goes nowhere and does nothing but meander. Rambling is what we school kids used to call what our teachers did when lecturing us spirited children at the end of a long week in public school, with the theme being how we could and should and ultimately would behave like responsible, courteous, and thoughtful or mindful human beings who would mature into solid, God-loving citizens of the US of A. These educators rolled their proverbial educational dice and hoped at least some of their passes of the ivories would reveal aggregates of sevens or elevens.
In short, these hard-working, dedicated, but slightly daunted public educators hoped against hope that we would finally begin to "get it," e.g. understand how the world of life really operated or spun incessantly while tilted at a very specific angle (26 degrees? I have no real clue, but that sounds possible, so let's go with that figure). But remember to please not forgive me for my ramblings because I neither expect nor want you to - forgive me, that is. Rambling, remember, is what I do best.
(And no, not like Steve Martin's hilarious bit being a "ramblin' kind of guy." Or, similar to Marshall Tucker's infectious, adorable, but venal ditty "Ramblin' on my Mind.")
And speaking of rambling, I only had disdain for a small handful of automobiles as a kid, but at the very top of the list of yecchy car makes was the Rambler, formerly Nash Rambler, future American Motors and eventually extinct. My other least favorite car brands were probably the undistinguished Nash; the Art-Deco, but still ugly-as-heck Edsel (named after Henry Ford's daughter or son, I forget whom); the Studebaker; and lastly the earliest Toyotas on American soil. But! I must admit / confess the Rambler sat perched atop of the whole heap of - well, heaps - of autos.
And lastly or thereabouts, was the infamous Midnight Rambler. No, not the fictitious Rolling Stones' killer / fiend on the loose, but the shows that the Band used to be part of when they played sleazy dives and sad taverns across Canada and America in the early Sixties.
So, the Midnight Rambler - according to the Band's drummer, vocalist, and baddest-ass member, Levon Helm - was (by way of my liberal paraphrase) something that happened at the ends of many a show on the drunkest night of the week:
We'd play these down-and-out joints that on weeknights might have four patrons and a fight would break out. But on Saturday nights, right around midnight, the jokes started getting a little sleazier, the songs start gettin' a bit racier, and the women began to REALLY dance. Yeah, Midnight Ramblers were what we lived for..." )
Okay, my Blogees, in the spirit of full disclosure, that last sentence I concocted out of whole cloth. (Albeit cheesy, tacky, garish cloth...
And what not.)
Sincerely and otherwise,
Patrick R. Rowlee - (my middle initial stands for........................... you guessed it: Rambler
