Monday to Memory

     A typical Monday here:

     Today is trash day, so after the guys in the big blue truck come, I’ll have the usual race to reach our empty barrels before our kind neighbor who shares the driveway brings them to our garage. With a bad hip, she only puts out one small bag compared to our pile, so it’s my weekly guilt trip.

     Then comes my 10 am low impact aerobics class, now grown to a permitted 25  as Covid restrictions ease at the Y. Today before class began, I overheard one woman going on and on about her “litter robot.” What in the world….? I thought, picturing apple cores, soda cans, and discarded paper about her house. Eventually I realized this was a conversation about a kitty litter box thingamajig. I can pin you to the wall with lengthy stories about past and current pets till your eyes roll back in your head, but this woman had more to say about kitty litter than Jimmy Stewart could ever have as Mr. Smith in the deepest throes of a filibuster.

     On the way home, the radio surprised me with a 70s (and inferior) version of a memory, and even with that pale adaptation I was transported back about 55 years.

     There aren’t that many perfect moments, but this was one of them. It was a Saturday night dance in our high school crew team’s big wooden boat house on the Potomac.* A warm summer evening, the inside dance floor sat over the dockings for the boats beneath, and the music was deafening. The building throbbed and we were all part of something, part of the same moment. Eddie Floyd belted out the song, and the old wooden floor shook as we all stomped our Bass Weejun loafers in time to the lyrics –

 “Gonna knock, knock, knock on wood, baby!”

 

 

* (Washington-Lee High School’s crew team began in 1949, and when the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley-on-Thames was opened to overseas public high schools in 1964, my school became the first overseas school to win the event.)