Those were the days,

filled with rubber bed liners and Ronald McDonald sheets...

a few random bits of nostalgia. indulge me.

Lately, I've been walking around my house singing songs like, "Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham" and "The Lord said to Noah there's gonna be a floody floody", along with "seek and ye shall find blah blah blah and love, love, love comes a tricklin down. " Church songs. Not Christmas related. But damn, we had fun at those folk masses when we were kids, didn't we? My mom, her best friend and my father, when he wasn't out at sea, would play the guitar, and we'd all get down and groove in the glory of the Lord. There is something about the feeling of innocence that those songs bring back that is really appealing. And well, it's one thing that I can remember really sharing with my family when I was a kid. And even now on those rare occasions that I am in the same room with my sister, we annoy the hell out of whoever is there by singing the Noah's Ark song. Why? Because it feels good.

When I was a kid, my mom's whole family would rent a beach house together in the Carolinas (well, that was where we lived) for, I don't know, a week in the summer? Every morning, we'd wake up to grandma cooking, Folgers coffee and cigarette smoke. Aunt C, in her long, ugly turquoise terrycloth zip up robe, would be in the kitchen picking at something in the fridge (sometimes raw ground beef- gross!) and our uncle, Buck, would still be asleep in bed. My mom and her baby brother would sit around the kitchen table chatting; Grandpa at the table with his crossword puzzle, or possibly at the Food Lion or Piggly Wiggly for some groceries; and the cousins and siblings would be somewhere underfoot. And this was my special time with grandma. I started drinking black coffee with her at the beach house when I was 4 or 5. And after that summer, whenever I visited grandma, we'd sit in the kitchen together with our coffee just like I was a real grown up woman. And that's how the addiction began.