Books and Blogs and volunteering

So I picked up a book and read it just because of the title.  The book was "Sister Golden Hair". If you know me, you know I am a BIG fan of the band "America'.  I love their music.  It makes me happy.  Deal with it.  For a while, my husband played in a metal band and the metalheads kind of made fun of me for being a folkie. Here's the deal.  You like what kind of music you like, what speaks to you, comforts you and gives your imagination wings.  It's been a long time, maybe never actually, that I felt the need to be considered "cool" by changing my tastes to fit the in-crowd.  Cool has always been being comfortable in my own skin and for the most part I am.  There ARE days I wish I were less.. me, but there I am.  I am 57 years old.  A major shift in personality is not something I am going to work on at this stage of the game.   Anyway, back to the book.  It's about a girl who is a teenager in Roanoke Virginia in the early 1970's   I kept waiting for the song to show up in the book; Jesse is a BIG Cher fan and considers her a goddess, even praying to her at some point.   She is a Bowie fan and the town has a big Lynyrd  Skynyrd  following.  Since they did not really come onto the music scene since way after the book begins in 1972 I had a problem with it.  But the song "Sister Golden Hair" is NEVER mentioned.  It never comes on the radio when she is up in her room late at night nor when she is riding in cars with boys.  Not once.   I was a bit miffed.  I have no idea why THAT is the title of the book.  I suppose Jesse is a blonde, but although she talks obsessively about hot rollers, she never mentions the color of her hair.  It wasn't a great book, but it was a book on cd and it kept me company when I drove out to my daughter's house this week. Do I recommend it?  No. There were some glaring errors in timeline and I kept trying to reconcile what year she said it was with the "history" and fashion she kept dropping in.  Maybe my memory is faulty, but the author should have fact checked stuff before relying on her memory for important details.

I haven't been writing and now that things are back on sort of an even keel and there will be a major change in my life I will be trying once again to work on the craft of writing.  NO I am not retiring- yet and no, Kate is not pregnant.  There will be a change that will happen in the next few weeks and I will talk about it after I have gotten everyone who needs to be on board with this, or at least informed.  Time to make a change ( as the America song goes)  I looked back over this blog and have seen that I am dissolving into a whiner.  Sometimes the pissing and moaning help me to realize something, but frankly it gets old.  I need to think more about things that are going on and maybe try to be a bit more philosophical or at least reasonable about them.  Except Donald Trump.  Never going to be reasonable about him.  He scares me.  His hate and vitriol are not good for this country and I truly hope whoever is elected will be a diplomat with brains, not a loud mouth with hair and a slick marketing agency behind him.  There is a Jackson Browne song that says "They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and our cars"  True.  I often quote rather obscure song lyrics to make my point.  Sometimes the singer-songwriters whose music speaks to me are like the modern day equivalent of philosophers, except Kanye West who is an idiot.  His recent begging for money from Mark Zuckerberg is laughable.  He begs for help from one side of his mouth and with the other goes on a rant about how he hates white people.  What a racist jerk.  Maybe he should ask The Donald if he can be his running mate.

I have been thinking about volunteerism and why I do it.  I worked an event recently and the topic came up several times about the idea that people only do this to get some form of public adulation.  I wondered if that was my motivation.  I don't think so, as I often volunteer for stuff and talk about it after the fact, unless I am trying to get people to help me or come to the event.  I get a lot out of it for myself. For the last 12 years, I have been coordinating the last water stop at the LA Marathon.  At first, I was disappointed not to be out there when the winner roars by,  We work the late shift and by the time I start the winner has already signed for the Honda and is in the hospitality suite getting a beer.   The people I see are the real winners; those who have been out there for seven or eight hours just putting one foot in front of the other to get to the finish line.  These people inspire me more than an elite runner who does this for a living ever could.  Their struggle to finish can be a mantra for my life.  Just keep moving and you will get there.