The Vintage Reader

So yesterday I'm cruising along listening to my favorite radio station, and they play side 2 of Bookends, which hit #1 on that day in 1968. It replaced The Graduate, which is also an S&G album, but I count it equally as a Dave Grusin album; his snaky party music on that album sums up the 60s for me, which might not being saying much since I only arrived in the latter half of the decade, but there you go.

So anyway. I got off the highway with "Hazy Shade of Winter" and headed to the drugstore. And just as I drove past the zoo, where lots of people were out enjoying the first real spring day we've had, guess what came on? That's right! "At the Zoo". I cranked it up so they could also enjoy lines like "Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages, and the zookeeper is very fond of rum". (And does anyone remember a children's book that came out--in the early 90s, I think--that was an illustrated version of the song? I never saw it, but apparently the illustration that accompanied that last line had some kind of friendly creature with a nametag that said "Rum" hugging the zookeeper. "Hamsters turn on frequently" had a hamster in a miner's hat with a light that turned on and off.)

This is not my first incidence of synchronicity this week, nor was it to be my last. A few days ago, as I drove past the parking lot they're repaving in the middle of what used to be a natural wetland, I heard "Big Yellow Taxi." I'm not sure that's so much synchronicity as normalcy for my environmentally oblivious area, though.

And then last night I was reading a short story by one of mystery's Big Guys. He grew up in the neighborhood I live in and went to the high school down the street. In the first paragraph of the story he mentions my hometown (1000 miles away) AND the radio station that used to be my favorite in another city, before Clear Channel bought it and turned it from one of the oldest rock-and-roll stations in the country to a syndicated All Talk All The Time station, ugh. It's attributed to the wrong city, but its call letters are the abbreviation for the airport in the city it's attributed to, so maybe the author was just having a little fun. He's been known to do that. On the next page, he mentions a country singer whose private e-mail address I have on a message in my inbox, because the singer's brother is an old friend who sends out a semiannual State of My Life report to his friends and family.

Well, okay, I thought it was a cool series of events. I think I'll go get some more coffee now.