Nostalgia in the Key of G
Work was very boring today. I found myself very bored by the end of my shift in the store. Bored, bored, bored. There was no one coming into the store, nothing to clean, and nothing else to do. In short, I was bored. Bored, bored, bored. Ask Mel how bored I was. She'll probably groan and tell you about the message I left her on the answering machine.
Poor Mel.
Mel would like to add: "You know, that's the first time you've actually said that in your blog. We've been married seven months...hey! Quit [typing what I'm saying]! I hate you..."
Anyhoo, the deepening of Mel's psychosis aside, I found myself incredibly, totally and without a doubt bored. As I wandered aimlessly around the store, lost in the thralls of death by boredom, a sudden song sprang into my mind.
What's impressive about this little ditty (I never thought I would ever use such a word in my little bit of nowhere. Oh well, a first for everything, like saying "Poor Mel".) is that I haven't sung this for almost fifteen years.
Rewind to one day earlier, or else a decade or so ago, when I was still living in southern Alberta. For those of you unfamiliar with the prairie region, let me summarize: there's a lot of flat land. Insert farmer's fields and trans-Canada highway at your leisure and you have the prairies.
As the joke goes, it's one of those places where you can see your dog running away for three days: "Well, it's day four, and I don't think he's coming back."
Now I lived in the city of Lethbridge, which has a very unique geographical feature: the Coulies. It's essentially a long, narrow gorge, filled with lots of wild grass, trees and rivers. In fact, the Coulies were carved by an old river over the centiures.
When I was a child, the local YMCA used to host a children's day camp during the summer, called appropriately enough Coulie Cougars. We did the sports, the crafts and whatnot, and towards the middle of the afternoon we would hike out of the coulies to the YMCA, where our day ended with a swim in the pool.
The daily hike up from the coulies was something I'll always love. It not only left me really trim and with a great tan every summer, but it gave me a wonderful appreciation for nature. That, and an appreciation for repeatedly belting out various cadences at the top of my lungs with my friends.
So imagine me, for a moment, dressed up and in my Bentley store filled with luggage and purses, wandering around and singing not-so-quietly the following lyrics:
I had a little turtle
His name was Tiny Tim
I put him in the bathtub
To see if he could swim
He drank up all the water
He ate up all the soap
He tried to eat the bathtub
But it wouldn't go down his throat
He floated down the river
He floated down the lake
And now my little turtle
Has got a belly-ache
I went and called the doctor
I went and called the nurse
I went and called the lady
With the alligator purse
"Measles," said the doctor
"Mumps," said the nurse
"A virus," said the lady
With the alligator purse
First she gave me peaches
Then she gave me pears
Then she gave me fifty cents
And kicked me down the stairs--OW!!
Yeah, most of that makes absolutely no sense, and the lady with the alligator purse is quite violent. And yet I adored regaling Mel with this entire song, one I had not sung in easily ten years. She has since forbidden me to sing it to any of the children she will one day teach, or to the children we will one day have.
Ah, youth.
Today's Lesson: only those who have seen the first episode of
Samurai Shampoo will understand the comedic nuance of the "rewind" reference. That's...what? Two of you?
Don't you feel special now?
posted by Phillip at 8:35 PM
