A little ditty about wedding songs

I had a wedding song before I met Joe.

It was a ditty by a girl on a guitar. Burned onto a mixed CD given to me by my old friend Sarah, whose imaginary cowboy this blog is named after.

I wasn't even sure who sang the song, or what it was titled, until my friend Ricci and I listened to it on repeat one afternoon in my Sarasota cracker shack, and Ricci went home, Googled the lyrics and discovered it was by Rosie Thomas and that the title was Wedding Day.

So much for love

Guess I've been wrong

But it's all right

Cuz I'm moving on

I've got my car all packed with cassette tapes
And sweaters and loose change and cheap cigarettes

The lyrics were neither romantic, nor bitter, somewhere in between Jewel and Alanis Morissette, which suited me just fine from 2005 to 2007.

I was single then. Somewhere in between grounded and orbiting space.

Working in a marble yard. Trying to write a novel. Living in a 1920s bungalow with exposed rafters and no air conditioning. No television. No wireless Internet. Just a black laptop computer that no longer held a charge, that was given to me by my best friend Ro in exchange for one roundtrip airplane ticket from Buffalo to Tampa.

It had been her computer when she was in college. My friend Troy called it my Carrie Bradshaw laptop. Having never seen Sex and the City, I had no idea Carrie Bradshaw had a laptop, much less the fact that it was, according to Troy, a big black one with loud keys.

But I thought it was pretty rad that when I was single I owned a Sex and the City prop, a chic accessory for a girl from the sticks.

I'm gonna drive through the hills
With my hand out the window
And sing 'til I run out of words
I'm gonna stop at every truck stop
Make small talk with waiters and truck driving men
I'm gonna fall asleep in the back seat
With no one around but me and my friends
It's gonna be so grand
It's gonna be just like my wedding day

Ricci and I hung on every word of that song. Blasted it when we'd drive from my bungalow to the public pool to swim laps. Loved that we didn't need boyfriends to have a wedding song. Loved that the lyrics evoked a sense of bliss some girls only experienced on their wedding days.

I'm gonna stop at every bar
and flirt with the cowboys in front of their girlfriends

Obviously, eventually, we got boyfriends.

Consequently, but not on purpose, we stopped listening to Wedding Day. It wasn't that we were making egg souffle for our boyfriends while whistling Dixie. It's just that in general, we spent a little less time together, a little less time driving to the pool to swim laps, a little less time pedaling our bikes, a little less time thinking this song would be our one and only wedding song.

I've had enough of love
It feels good to give up
So good to be good to myself
I'm gonna get on the highway with no destination
And plenty of vision in mind
And I'm gonna drive to the ocean
Go skinny dipping
Blow kisses to venus and mars

When Joe and I got engaged this fall, we didn't start discussing wedding details until months after the Question Had Been Popped. When we got on the subject of wedding songs it seemed neither of us had any one song in mind, so I suggested Etta James' At Last, not realizing Beyonce had recorded a version of it for her role in Cadillac Records, also not realizing the Obamas would dance to it five million times the night of the inauguration.

Recently, I interviewed Bobby Vinton, the 1960s crooner responsible for such wicked ballads as, Blue Velvet, Roses are Red (My Love), I Love How You Love Me, Mr. Lonely, and the 1970s Polish love polka, My Melody of Love.

I did my fair share of Internet research before meeting Vinton, downloading corky love songs my Nana probably loves, leaving Joe voice mail messages to the tune of Blue Velvet. The innocent schmaltz had kind of grown on me – and not in an ironic hipster way.

I started thinking: what kind of love song best describes me and Joe, the couple?

After I left my sunglasses at Bobby Vinton's beach estate, I figured we had to go with a Vinton ballad. It lends itself to a good story and I'll be damned if I pass up a good story, even if I have to dance to a Polish love polka on my wedding night. Besides, Joe digs the fact that Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco dance to Roses are Red in Goodfellas.

I'm gonna drive under skyline and sunshine
Drink good wine in vineyards
And get asked to dance
I'm gonna be carefree and let nothing pass me by
Never ever again

This song was my wedding song when I was single. It was appropriate. I could relate to it. I could belt it out in cars. I could be single to it.

What I need now is a song I can be married to.

--

PS. The picture was taken in the first two months of our relationship. We were staying at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale and we had just gotten out of bed. I remember thinking at the moment, I'm happy just watching this man put his contacts in.

PPS. For more on Rosie Thomas.

Luck, faith and benevolent Canadians.

Glorious sleep. Glorious, frothy dream-filled sleep! Keep it coming, Mr. Sandman.

After spending both September and October fending off nightmares, I'm thrilled to report that November has been less cruel to my fretful unconscious.

Employed as a nanny for seven sniveling children, I would dream horrible things. Dreams that would wake me in the middle of the night and cause my head grief the following morning.

In one month I pounded an entire bottle of Advil.

Mostly, I had nightmares about the woman I worked for - the stay-at-home mother-of-seven, who spent her days in spandex exercise gear, scribbling grocery lists on the back of her kids' stick figure drawings, rattling off demands hurriedly and with a tight, cold scowl that pulled her tanning-bed skin into a kind of leather hide that reminded me of the bottom of moccasins that sell for nine bucks on Indian reservations.

The Friday before Joe and I closed on our house, Wall Street collapsed and our pre-approved mortgage was almost denied. Why? Because I quit my job as a staff writer at a newspaper so I could freelance from St. Pete and moonlight as Mr. Belvedere for one humiliating month.

The day the mortgage broker called to tell me my career switcheroo was about to cost us our house, I calmly provided him the name and number of my new spandexed employer, swallowed two Xanax and rehearsed between snot-sucking sobs, how I would break the news to Joe.

Later that day, while doped up on anti-anxiety medication, the mortgage broker called to tell me to breathe. He would use the jaws of life to secure our loan. Staff writer or disgruntled nanny, he'd find a way to approve our mortgage, of course not without first using the phrase, "by the skin of your teeth."

When we closed Oct. 3, and the subject of my employment came up, the woman who owns the title company kicked me under the table, and without making eye contact said to Joe and I, "If anything has changed with anyone's employment situation, please by all means don't tell me."

I never stopped writing for the newspaper. Juggling both jobs, I banked my Belvedere money for furniture and scribbled notes at night about how the protagonist in my novel would never be a nanny, because to subject her to such tyranny would be to limit the depths of her character.

Four years of college and four more years of reporting and here I was, folding some woman's thong underwear into a silk square smaller than a postage stamp. One night, while putting her children to bed, the 6-year-old turned to me and snapped, "You use a lot of big words for a first-time babysitter. What are you a scientist or something?"

"Well," I replied. "Before I was your babysitter, I was a reporter. My job was to write stories for the newspaper."

"Like the St. Pete times?" She asked.

"Not quite," I said. "But something like that."

Two weeks later, on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October, after Joe had assembled my new pine desk and we'd scheduled our first trip to Ikea, the spandexed mother-of-seven fired me.

Who would have thought that in these piss-poor economic times that getting shit-canned would feel so good?

I started this post weeks ago. At first it began like: "She was a straight up rich bitch, who despised me for reasons I'll never know. She fired me because she claimed I couldn't be trusted with her children ..."

And you know what? I deleted the whole sour-pussed rant. The world is too hopeful right now to mop up my absence on this blog with negativity. The last headache I had was the result of two glasses of champagne, consumed Tuesday night during Barack Obama's acceptance speech. So in the spirit of optimism, I'll spare you the tirade and leave you with a story about luck, faith and benevolent Canadians.

I've always thought lucky pennies were underrated. If you're like me, when you find a lucky penny you forget to note which side is facing up when you pick it up.

As children we're taught (perhaps by grandparents or big-fannied aunts) that pennies are lucky. That when we find one we should pocket it. Forget the fact that Lucky Penny lore only holds true when a coin is found head's side up. For those of us who operate on whimsy, technicalities like this are easy to dismiss.

If you're a hopeless non-denominational optimist like me, you have faith in the idea that pennies can't possibly be cursed. What kind of prick universe would this be if half the pennies we found were responsible for half our misfortunes? If I could add up all the pennies - lucky or otherwise - that I've collected over the years I could probably buy Joe a nice steak dinner on the better side of Tampa. Besides, if all pennies can be used to make wishes then certainly no penny is luckier than another.

But why the subject of pennies? Specifically the crusty, oxidized one that was given to me last month by a Canadian man after my car was pinned between a concrete wall and a motor home while driving 75-mph on the interstate?

I'll spare you the details of what could have been a dreadful accident. As talented an embellisher as I am, I cannot exaggerate non-existent, non-dreadful details. I can only credit my reaction time, the fact that I was listening to The Chemical Brothers, and two benevolent Canadians.

In the nanoseconds that passed between the offending motor home to my left, and the concrete wall to my right, I somehow managed to summon a previous life as a tomboy in the sticks of Western New York, where as a teenager I drove a demolition car named The Vaginator in the fields behind an ex-boyfriend's house.

Locking the brakes on my Honda Civic, I kept the car on a straight skid as I pinballed between the RV and the wall. Had the benevolent Canadians, who were driving behind me when the accident occurred, not pulled over to provide a witness statement, the officer who responded to the crash would have cited me for failure to yield the right-of-way.

"Failure to yield the right-of-way?" Cried the benevolent Canadians. "She had nowhere to yield to!"

"Yes I understand," said the officer. "But if the people in the motor home wanted to argue the situation she would've had a hard time proving her case."

While we waited for the necessary paperwork to wrap up one of the benevolent Canadians handed me a penny.

"I found it by your car," he said cheerfully. "Pennies from heaven you know."

Funny, I thought. My godless family never phrased it like that.

On Tuesday, I got my car back from the collision shop. It looks brand new thanks to four new tires, a rearview mirror, and a week's worth of banging out and buffing up. The guys at Wulff's Collision on 20th Avenue couldn't have been nicer or more skilled.

As for the penny, it went back into circulation sometime last week when I purchased ice cream at CVS. I have no idea if the benevolent Canadian found it heads up or heads down, and I totally forgot to ask.

Losing the hockey mom vote.

Before I leave to cover U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan's election party at the Sarasota Hyatt, I thought I'd share with you this anecdote:

My mother, who hasn't voted in an election since 1980, cast her vote today at the Langford Fire Hall in North Collins, NY. 

In a rural Erie County farming town that still uses the old lever and curtain voting booth, my mother cast her vote for Barack Obama. She even called to share the news, she was so proud of her voter participation. 

Later in the day, while waiting in the check-out line at a Marshalls department store near Buffalo, N.Y., my mother overheard two ladies discussing today's election. 

Said one lady to the other: "White people should be ashamed of themselves, voting for Obama." And then, turning to face my mother, she croaked: "Did you vote?"

My mother, in her trademark non-confrontational Western New York accent, replied: "You should be ashamed of yourself. At moments like this I'm ashamed to be white."

Mom, in your honor. This post. 

For the best election coverage in the Tampa Bay area, click here.

Squinters for Obama!

I should have gotten a press pass ... 

Attending Barack Obama's rally today in Sarasota hadn't occurred to me, until I was held up at University Parkway and U.S. 41 as Obama's motorcade passed. 

For the hell of it, I turned toward my buddy Roger's favorite Ed Smith Stadium, and walked one mile to the field, where I ferreted my way through the town's underground democrats. 

Before I leave for my 4 p.m. massage, I'll leave you with four observations from the ground:

1. One Obama supporter was in such a hurry to park his Ford pick-up truck that he drove it off the road and into a grassy ditch, where he instantly buried the back tires in the mud. I'm not sure how the christ he's going to tow the thing out. He ran the hitch underground.

2. Two teenage boys discussing the nature of their mothers' apathy: "My ma never votes," said one boy. "Where does she live?" Asked the other. "Pennsylvania," the boy replied. "Shit, dude. That's a swing state," said his friend.

3. Sarasota City Commissioner Fredd "Glossie" Atkins doing a kind of Christmas storefront Santa Claus jig in the front row bleachers. When the speech was over, Glossie held up five fingers and repeatedly yelled, "Five days."

4. An exasperated man in a Montgomery Air Conditioning & Heating uniform elbowing his way through the crowd, frantic because he couldn't find, "the wife."