Wish upon a star …

Of course you have and I hope you still do.

For this, the first Wednesday in October, I give you a wish and a memory … to wish for better times coming in your life … to remember those times that are gone with a smile.

A wish …

Ah,  wouldn’t it be nice if the world was as simple as a wish?

Twinkle, twinkle, little star and each night a thousand stars come out to greet us. Up above the world so high, one shoots across the heavens and blazes the way to our secret desires.

Out there in the universe somewhere, our wishes fly on gossamer wings. Tie your dreams to the tail of a kite or float them above the clouds. Watch as they slide over the rainbow and shimmer inside a silver moonbeam.

The original journal of Ramblings was kept over thirty years ago to fill pages with a young mother’s angst and daily folly. It was but one of several journals, diaries, those secret pages where I might steal away and tell my troubles to …

Well I suppose to you.

~~~~~~~

A memory …

I’d like to give you a really short, short inspired by Sheri Degrom’s writing prompt.

If it hadn’t been for the 80’s I wouldn’t have lived at all.

I had one of those Baby Boomer from the good old Fifties kind of childhood. I threw off the bra, cut away the jeans and protested through the Sixties.

My life had meaning. I fought windmills, spoke against oppression, government involvement in my personal life, and the military complex fighting an illegal war in South East Asian. I was part of a greater good, the bigger picture.

Then it crashed like being on speed for too many days and finding yourself standing in front of the meat counter in the supermarket crying because you can’t decide between brisket of beef or chicken.

It crashed like a B-52 Bomber taking a nose dive into the Grand Canyon.

Purpose, meaning, and free sex were all gone.

Soon we moved reluctantly into the boring Seventies, to Watergate, scandal, the end of Vietnam, the beginning of the end for Jimmy Carter. The Seventies when the kids didn’t know we were broke all the time or that normal families did not eat pancakes four days a week because it was fun to have breakfast for dinner.

Dare I say that Ronnie came charging on his white steed and saved the day? Dare I believe that a conservative brought balance and meaning into my otherwise liberal, chaotic life?

No, it didn’t start with Ronnie.

It started one rainy day in 1981 when after her beloved husband, and my uncle, passed on to that great Italian pizzeria in the sky, my Aunt Lucille moved into our family house in Park Slope, Brooklyn … the same house where only eighteen months earlier my mother lost her one true love and best friend, my dad.

In 1981 Viola drove from Duchess County and helped Aunt Lucille move into the first floor bedroom; the one with the private bath and door to the garden. The one with an intercom Aunt Lucille used twenty-four seven to torture all those living under my mother’s roof.

In 198l after being rudely evicted from our one bedroom apartment in Bath Beach, Viola came back to help me renovate our third floor, two bedroom apartment.

The Eighties … the decade that started with The Twenty-Mule-Team Borax man and my crabby aunt, and continued with my children’s adolescence and their friends, Generation X-ers to the last. They screamed of the Eighties, Dock Martins, Madonna, Michael Jackson’s one glove, and Al Pacino in Scarface.

Hell no we won’t go was replaced by Word Up or when in a hurry … Word.

If it hadn’t been for the 80’s I wouldn’t have known that decadence is fun, that meaningful activities can be replaced with hours of music videos, and endless games of Clue and who killed who in the Billiard Room with the Wrench.

Not to mention the fun of one particular Sunday when I transported my nemesis, Aunt Lucille on my flat bed truck to a meeting at our local Catholic church.

But that’s a story for another time.

#############

Let us not forget … the eighties also gave us Tom Cruise and his hair in Top Gun.

What is your fondest memory of those years and

when was the last time you wished upon a star?

fOIS In The City