Get it While You Can
Normally my latest columns go up top each week but where I'm a little behind with them I think I'll use one here. This is called "Get it While You Can" and if you don't feel like reading just scroll down to the video and watch Janis sing one of her best and God wasn't she something, the greatest white blues singer there ever was they say and she just a girl in her 20s. She died of an overdose and the dazzling album "Pearl" was released posthumously.
I condensed this a bit to give everybody a break on a Sunday:
“LOOK at that girl sitting in her boyfriend’s lap and kissing him, in public! We never did that in MY day!” That was my first thought as I passed the two teens in the park yesterday. My second thought? “No, Terry. The summer you met that certain guy the two of you used to lie right down and kiss - in this very same park even.” I remember a man in a suit passing us as we sat up after one of these lengthy smooch sessions. He was crumpling up the brown paper bag that had held his sandwich, heading back to the office. “Hey, get it while you can,” he said to that long-ago boy, now my mate of many years - and this two full years before Janis recorded the famous song by the same name.On this day in the park everyone I saw seemed to be doing just that in this most civilized of urban spaces. Getting it all while they could I mean: the sunshine, the air so fresh it almost tingled as you inhaled it, just all of it.I saw a Bernese Mountain Dog the size of an elementary school furnace, docilely loping along on the leash that bound him to his tiny mistress. "WHO’S a good puppy!“ enthused a man clanking with tools, who then bent down to the beast and let his faced be slathered in kisses. "He looks like Beethoven!” a woman in African told me as she looked on and I assume she must have meant the star of the 90s dog movie and not the composer as you think of him in the famous bust with his genius frown and his wild toss of curls.The skinny teen with the girlfriend in his lap was under the shade of a giant tree but most people were seeking the sun - like the man with closed eyes who had propped himself up against his backpack. Whether he was sleeping there on the grass or listening to music delivered by the headphones clamped over his dreadlocks one thing was sure: He was in some ecstasy of inner calm....Two hundred feet away, a woman lay flat on her back like a human sacrifice, her pale exposed stomach mounded like rising dough, her thighs so tanned and shiny they looked like hot dogs on the grill. Nobody bothered her.There's that kind of trust in a park - and sometimes there's political action: At the top of the hill this day, an agitation of striking workers held signs and chanted slogans. “No justice, no peace!” they shouted, while like-minded drivers passing by hooted and tapped their horns and made thumbs-up gestures in solidarity.Then suddenly, the cream ice man tooled by in his truck, his sound apparatus blaring out what seemed like every tune ever written in the last hundred years: about 30 bars each of “Ebb Tide,” and “The Theme From The Godfather,” of “Happy Birthday” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” of “New York, New York” and “Come, All Ye Faithful.”The last one struck me as strange on a blooming June day but what do I knows? Maybe this is how we seem to God at any given moment: the sleeping and the wakeful, the lively and the calm, and emitting from us all as a kind of soundtrack, the distant tingling jingle of our lives.And now here's our girl, as alive-seeming today as she sounded and looked when she recorded this on the Dick Cavett Show so long and long ago.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju9yFA1S7K8]
