"The
Carter Family" by Carly Simon has been stuck between my ears for the past
couple of days and I was thinking about it this morning while I was laying in
bed trying to decide if today was a good day to get up early or one of those
sleep in days. Turns out that it is an "early...ish" day.
The theme
of the song (for me) is how people and things that meant so much to you in the
past lose their significance over time. In the song, she comes to realize that
in the end it was her that changed, not the people and things. Well, that’s what I got from it anyways.
For all I know, Carly might be trying to tell us that life is better when you
screw over your friends and loved ones. I prefer the happier version.
I’m not entirely sure that we
ever really regret our past actions. Sure we say we do, but it is pretty rare
that someone does anything about it unless they are on step eight and nine of a
twelve step program. One of Louise’s favourite sayings
is that humans are rationalizing beings, not rational beings.
This made
pretty good sense to me the first thing this morning, and it led beautifully
into the next part of the blog. I can’t imagine what morning Ken was thinking of, but oft times
he is a more than a little "morning foggy".
When I
was kid, I loved bottle caps. Who knows
why, they were smelly, sticky, dented and had little or no value. I would go up
to gas stations and any where else and ask the guys there if I could have the
bottle caps from the machine. Sometimes the guys would give me a hard time and
ask if I would pay for them or what I planned to do with them. The odd time a
guy would refuse because he wanted them for himself. Prick!
Normally,
the guy would say “Sure kid, come back every day we get thousands of them and
just toss them in the garbage.” He would open the container and more often than not, dump
them in my shirt. I would hurry home with them and in the back yard I would
sort them according to brand, Coke, 7UP, Fanta orange and grape and of course
root beer. You would think that I would have been knee deep in bottle caps
within a month or so, but I suspect that mom or dad tossed them out almost as
soon as I collected them.
There wasn’t much that you could do with
bottle caps without an imagination. You could take the cork liner out and then
press it back in with your t-shirt in between making a badge. Sometimes it
would be a sherrifs badge from the old west and you were going after Billy the
Kid or Black Bart. Perhaps you were a war hero and the bottle caps were all of
the medals you won fighting the enemy. Sometimes, you would just flip them into
a hat. Well, sometimes I would flip them close to a hat.
I
remember once seeing a man made out of bottle caps stacked on top of each
other, and I planned to make one of those someday. My bucket list isn’t really too difficult I
guess. I did make a mud scrapper for the cottage once. It involved and
afternoon sitting on the driveway with a bottle of nails, hundreds of bottle
caps and a large piece of wood. Each cap had to be nailed in such a way that
there was no space between them. My skill with hammer and nails hadn’t fully developed at that time
and I would imagine that the caps which weren’t totally flattened weren’t held on very well. Be that
as it may, I was pretty proud of that mud scrapper and to their credit, mom,
dad and Gram put it right beside the door of the cottage. I remember searching
for mud so that I could test the scrapper, and I suppose it worked pretty well.
Maybe I’ll see if the kids will save
me their caps from the beers they drink, and when I get enough it just might be
time to make that bottle cap man.
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