Thursday, June 08, 2006
You Can't Always Get What You Want
(It’s about the song).
This morning I got into the van to go to a youth meeting—actually, a meeting about youth—down at St. Anthony of Padua. We’re in discussion as a parish about whether to do more things as an east-of-Grand bloc of parishes. Specifically about youth and young adult issues. It’s odd. The same people were at this meeting as were at the one I attended in May, but back then, they were curious, interested, optimistic—and this time, they were big ole naysayers. Who knows. Maybe it will work out. Or maybe this will show me what we don’t exactly want to do and then learn how to approach YPIUS, which is the youth group at my parish.
But before the meeting, in the car, I turned off the Smithsonian Folkways for Children CD (or whatever it was called). I had heard enough of Woody Guthrie feeling proud of himself about being so authentic and Pete Seeger saying “cock-a-doodle-do”, which he does in at least two songs. One is appropriate: I had a rooster/the rooster pleased me/I fed my rooster neath the greenberry tree/the little rooster went cock-a-doodle-do-dee-doodle-dee-doodle-dee-doodle-dee-do. But the other one is essentially gratuitous roosters: All around the kitchen, cock-a-doodle-doodle-do! Repeat 97 times. Loosely integrate a hokey-pokey style dance. Enough!
So off went the cock-a-doodle music and on went one of our oldies stations, which is where I am in life right now. I am too old for edgy rock music, too white for any station billing itself as “Smooth Jazz” or “Hip Hop”, too young for “Adult Contemporary”, and too ADD right this minute to listen to NPR, which is the usual car selection. But sometimes I can agree enough with the non-Clear Channel oldies station (technically, 70s and 80s, not 50s and 60s) that I listen. The Rolling Stones song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” came on and I blared it, kids in the car staring at me like I’d lost my mind. And they’re 4 ½ and almost 2.
It brought me back to 1999 or so. I can’t remember the exact year. It was before my parents moved here (pre-2000) but after we moved to Halliday (post-1998) so I would guess I’m right. My cousin Adrienne got pregnant accidentally, I suppose she was about 20, unmarried, still living at home. The father wasn’t anybody’s favorite anything. My brother later referred to him as Jabba The Hut, and for Ian to say that, you must understand that this guy was both gigantic and slovenly. And probably liked chaining up skinny young things in bikinis and speaking in pidgin English: me Jabba no barter.
Instead of what might have been a wise decision and breaking off the relationship and keeping the baby a secret, she decides to get married to him. Now, Catholics who know they are pregnant are not supposed to get married during the pregnancy—a priest is happy to marry them (at least he should be) after the baby is born and there’s been time for reflection, but you don’t take marriage lightly (which is also why our divorce laws are so irritatingly complex and tend to be unfair in their application—but I tend to agree with the pregnancy rule). So my aunt found a UCC minister who was willing to come to their home and marry these two in the living room. My aunt has a big rambling house in north county, there was plenty of room for all of us and for him and his fat mother and sister. And his first child. By another woman. That he had custody of, essentially, I suppose, because his mother was permanent childcare? Don’t know. I only knew him for that one day—they were divorced within a year, after she’d had the baby (Amethyst Dawn), had a stroke, and was left pretty much completely debilitated for some time. And lost custody of Amethyst to that gross, gross man, as well as forced to pay child support when she couldn’t even stay awake for longer than 3 hours at a time. It quickly became a dire situation, very sad, like something out of a Dorothy Allison novel. I’ve never met Amethyst; I have no idea even how Adrienne is—she doesn’t come to my parents’ Christmas party, even when her mom and dad come, and her smart funny sister Amanda and her smart funny brother Adam come over.
At the wedding, because I was young, relatively, and because I had no children of my own yet, I could not bridge the gap emotionally between myself (smart, funny, married homeowner with a job that I was) and the real adults in the room, my aunt, my grandmother, a few of my uncles. They all knew how grim this was. This was not a couple who would have settled down and had a couple more kids and lived in suburbia and laughed later on, in their 40s, when they told friends how stupid they were not to know how to use a condom way back when. This was not my brother, who got a girl pregnant and didn’t marry her right away, for all the Catholic reasons, frankly—and then stayed by Ashley and married her when Kennedy was 2. These were not people who could take the long view. There was rumor that there was a considerable amount of drugs going into both parties’ systems, the specific rumor was the hoosier crack: crystal meth. At the wedding, all I could think of was, wow, am I glad I did things in the right order. Not, wow, they don’t even know there is an order. They don’t know what tomorrow is.
The house was big, but the rooms were chopped up, such that the wedding happened in the front room, the immediate family in attendance, and most of the concerned guests in the hall and the dining room. Since I didn’t have any money on this horse, I was in the kitchen. I could hear the ceremony, but didn’t see it. My grandmother, who by rights probably should have been in the living room, stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder, crying. Mike stood next to me, probably wondering what the hell I’d dragged him to this time and when could we go get a soda and high tail it back to south city. And my uncle Patrick stood on my left.
Patrick has been around a couple of blocks. He was in the Navy, on the Kitty Hawk, and then later in the Marines, smart as a whip like most of my father’s siblings, has a degree from Purdue in mathematics, for instance. Nowadays he’s married to his high school sweetheart and is a vice-principal at a north county high school. But before this, he married a topless dancer, who later died, and Brooke, down in Houston, who later died. He has his fair share of tattoos from the Phillipines, and once he called my grandmother from the Navy and said, “I’m not going anywhere.” Just that. Two days later we invaded Grenada—but he was safe in San Diego. He’s my godfather and he’s ok. Can’t say that about all my uncles, but Pat came out smelling like a rose. So he’s standing to my left, and the UCC minister is talking extemporaneously, pretending what she’s doing is both holy and welcome. She starts the marriage ceremony, and Patrick, just loud enough for me, possibly my uncle Glennon standing on the other side, to hear, starts whistling that song:
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you might find
You get what you need
This morning I got into the van to go to a youth meeting—actually, a meeting about youth—down at St. Anthony of Padua. We’re in discussion as a parish about whether to do more things as an east-of-Grand bloc of parishes. Specifically about youth and young adult issues. It’s odd. The same people were at this meeting as were at the one I attended in May, but back then, they were curious, interested, optimistic—and this time, they were big ole naysayers. Who knows. Maybe it will work out. Or maybe this will show me what we don’t exactly want to do and then learn how to approach YPIUS, which is the youth group at my parish.
But before the meeting, in the car, I turned off the Smithsonian Folkways for Children CD (or whatever it was called). I had heard enough of Woody Guthrie feeling proud of himself about being so authentic and Pete Seeger saying “cock-a-doodle-do”, which he does in at least two songs. One is appropriate: I had a rooster/the rooster pleased me/I fed my rooster neath the greenberry tree/the little rooster went cock-a-doodle-do-dee-doodle-dee-doodle-dee-doodle-dee-do. But the other one is essentially gratuitous roosters: All around the kitchen, cock-a-doodle-doodle-do! Repeat 97 times. Loosely integrate a hokey-pokey style dance. Enough!
So off went the cock-a-doodle music and on went one of our oldies stations, which is where I am in life right now. I am too old for edgy rock music, too white for any station billing itself as “Smooth Jazz” or “Hip Hop”, too young for “Adult Contemporary”, and too ADD right this minute to listen to NPR, which is the usual car selection. But sometimes I can agree enough with the non-Clear Channel oldies station (technically, 70s and 80s, not 50s and 60s) that I listen. The Rolling Stones song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” came on and I blared it, kids in the car staring at me like I’d lost my mind. And they’re 4 ½ and almost 2.
It brought me back to 1999 or so. I can’t remember the exact year. It was before my parents moved here (pre-2000) but after we moved to Halliday (post-1998) so I would guess I’m right. My cousin Adrienne got pregnant accidentally, I suppose she was about 20, unmarried, still living at home. The father wasn’t anybody’s favorite anything. My brother later referred to him as Jabba The Hut, and for Ian to say that, you must understand that this guy was both gigantic and slovenly. And probably liked chaining up skinny young things in bikinis and speaking in pidgin English: me Jabba no barter.
Instead of what might have been a wise decision and breaking off the relationship and keeping the baby a secret, she decides to get married to him. Now, Catholics who know they are pregnant are not supposed to get married during the pregnancy—a priest is happy to marry them (at least he should be) after the baby is born and there’s been time for reflection, but you don’t take marriage lightly (which is also why our divorce laws are so irritatingly complex and tend to be unfair in their application—but I tend to agree with the pregnancy rule). So my aunt found a UCC minister who was willing to come to their home and marry these two in the living room. My aunt has a big rambling house in north county, there was plenty of room for all of us and for him and his fat mother and sister. And his first child. By another woman. That he had custody of, essentially, I suppose, because his mother was permanent childcare? Don’t know. I only knew him for that one day—they were divorced within a year, after she’d had the baby (Amethyst Dawn), had a stroke, and was left pretty much completely debilitated for some time. And lost custody of Amethyst to that gross, gross man, as well as forced to pay child support when she couldn’t even stay awake for longer than 3 hours at a time. It quickly became a dire situation, very sad, like something out of a Dorothy Allison novel. I’ve never met Amethyst; I have no idea even how Adrienne is—she doesn’t come to my parents’ Christmas party, even when her mom and dad come, and her smart funny sister Amanda and her smart funny brother Adam come over.
At the wedding, because I was young, relatively, and because I had no children of my own yet, I could not bridge the gap emotionally between myself (smart, funny, married homeowner with a job that I was) and the real adults in the room, my aunt, my grandmother, a few of my uncles. They all knew how grim this was. This was not a couple who would have settled down and had a couple more kids and lived in suburbia and laughed later on, in their 40s, when they told friends how stupid they were not to know how to use a condom way back when. This was not my brother, who got a girl pregnant and didn’t marry her right away, for all the Catholic reasons, frankly—and then stayed by Ashley and married her when Kennedy was 2. These were not people who could take the long view. There was rumor that there was a considerable amount of drugs going into both parties’ systems, the specific rumor was the hoosier crack: crystal meth. At the wedding, all I could think of was, wow, am I glad I did things in the right order. Not, wow, they don’t even know there is an order. They don’t know what tomorrow is.
The house was big, but the rooms were chopped up, such that the wedding happened in the front room, the immediate family in attendance, and most of the concerned guests in the hall and the dining room. Since I didn’t have any money on this horse, I was in the kitchen. I could hear the ceremony, but didn’t see it. My grandmother, who by rights probably should have been in the living room, stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder, crying. Mike stood next to me, probably wondering what the hell I’d dragged him to this time and when could we go get a soda and high tail it back to south city. And my uncle Patrick stood on my left.
Patrick has been around a couple of blocks. He was in the Navy, on the Kitty Hawk, and then later in the Marines, smart as a whip like most of my father’s siblings, has a degree from Purdue in mathematics, for instance. Nowadays he’s married to his high school sweetheart and is a vice-principal at a north county high school. But before this, he married a topless dancer, who later died, and Brooke, down in Houston, who later died. He has his fair share of tattoos from the Phillipines, and once he called my grandmother from the Navy and said, “I’m not going anywhere.” Just that. Two days later we invaded Grenada—but he was safe in San Diego. He’s my godfather and he’s ok. Can’t say that about all my uncles, but Pat came out smelling like a rose. So he’s standing to my left, and the UCC minister is talking extemporaneously, pretending what she’s doing is both holy and welcome. She starts the marriage ceremony, and Patrick, just loud enough for me, possibly my uncle Glennon standing on the other side, to hear, starts whistling that song:
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you might find
You get what you need
