Pastoral
Sunday I drove to a point north of Austin, like I do every other week. I turned on the radio when I reached the city limit, because Austin’s radio stations are more exciting than Houston’s.
In the town of Paige, Led Zeppelin’s “Been a Long Time” went very well with the cloudy skies and all the antique pick-ups on the sides of the road.
In Elgin/Coupland/Taylor, I switched to KMFA. The woman told me it was almost time for her to go. She said something like, “…KMFA, one of the very few places where you can hear Beethoven’s Symphony Number 6, the Pastorale, in its entirety.”
Like some of you may be doing right now, I thought of the movie Fantasia, the part with the dating centaurs and baby pegasusses and Zeus’s lightning bolts. I decided to listen to the symphony all the way through. It went well with all the wildflowers on the side of the road. Not bluebonnets anymore, but four or five kinds of yellow flowers, then yellow and red, then just pure red like blood and strawberries and glowing coals. Then those against white. Then, yes, a tiny bit of bluebonnets remaining.
I didn’t think I liked that symphony that much. (I thought I only like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, even though the dinosaurs were dying.) But I guess I did. Either that, or it made me remember a lot of stuff, like my oldest son as a toddler, more than ten years ago, begging to watch again the VHS of Fantasia that his grandmother got from a garage sale. And spinning, spinning, spinning to the Beethoven. And swooping and jumping to the Stravinsky while I listened from the kitchen. And falling asleep at the Ave Maria. Because it made me a little bit emotional to hear it, after all this time.
In the town where I was supposed to end up, I switched to the big band station, just like always. It gets the best reception there, on the radio and in my mind.
My boyfriend is six years younger than me. Later, I asked him if he’d ever seen Fantasia. He said, “The one about Mickey Mouse in the wizard suit?”
Yeah, that one. I didn’t even remember that part until he said it.
My Fellow Travelers
Recently, on the freeway, on my hour-and-fifteen-minute commute, I have seen:
a woman curling her eyelashes
a woman reading a book
a man eating an economy-sized can of apricots, with a spoon
all while driving.
I can always tell when people are new to my commute, because of the way they’re shocked at the lane merge, the way they scheme to cut around the rest of us, and then the way they’re finally shocked at the length of the drive. The way that they’re so angry. I used to feel that way, too, when I first started. I railed against my fate. I used to let fate get the better of my blood pressure.
Now I just listen to CDs.
Sex and Violence
My kids are annoyed with me because I didn’t let them watch the last DVD we had of Battlestar Galactica. See, we’re renting the seasons, disk by disk, and I watched a disk while the kids were at their dad’s for the weekend. This one only had two episodes on it, so they didn’t miss much. But I decided to return it without letting them see it, because the second episode was very disturbing to me. It contained violence and rape. And, not just rape, but an actor doing a very convincing portrayal of someone who enjoyed rape. It was horrifying. I could barely watch.
“It sounds disturbing,” said my middle son, twelve years old, “but now I want to see it for myself so I can know for sure.”
“No, it was sick,” I said. “I can’t believe they showed that stuff on TV. Even cable.”
“Well, now I’m just pissed that we missed it,” said my oldest.
In general, I think it’s good when your kids grow up with so little trauma that they aren’t afraid to see bad things on TV. Personally, I thought I was going to have nightmares that night. (But I didn’t. I dreamed about Carmen Electra, instead.)
