(HOST) Daylight slips away faster now that September is here. Yet commentator Anne Averyt has discovered that the night is as full of stories as the sky is full of stars.
(AVERYT) I am not known for my wealth of knowledge about pop culture. But I have discovered the Cliff Notes of catch-up streaming on my laptop. I am now working my way through the music of my generation that I somehow missed. Catching up with the Who; making magic with Simon and Garfunkel, all of us off in search of America.
When I tire of music, I curl up with words. Frequently, I invite Maya Angelo over for virtual tea, and she regales me with the lilt of her voice and the laughter in her eyes. Mary Oliver usually can’t make tea, but she often drops by in early morning, toting her binoculars on life and reassuring me I do not have to crawl a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
If poetry seems like tame evening entertainment, I hop a light beam and probe the mysteries of distant space. Recently a flash of light flirted with me on my 15 inch monitor, a kind of cosmic Match.com. Unfortunately, that star wink, a dimpled twinkle from the most distant object in the universe, occurred nearly 14 billion years ago. Not much chance of a dancing date with that starlet. It’s been racing to meet me since the dawn of time; but it died trying, swallowed by a Black Hole not long after it twinkled my way. In this modern fantasy of illusion, I am watching, live, what is not there, all courtesy of NASA and YouTube.
If I don’t feel so adventurous, I just settle back into recent time past and spin the kaleidoscope of my own history. Thanks to the magic of Google, I can research a dream, travel back nearly 50 years, and listen to a proud black man standing in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln, talking about his vision for America.
Then, clicking a link, I leap ahead 46 years and hear a proud black woman sing with heart and soul about the bell ring of freedom, claiming the promise of Martin Luther King’s dream. That raw January morning, so many years later, was the dawn of the new day King envisioned, the inauguration of America’s first black President.
And Aretha Franklin, the woman in the winged victory hat singing on the steps of the Capitol, is the same Lady of Soul who in the 1960s taught me about Respect. It is a message, one of the songs of my generation that I did not miss.
Such is the variety of my evenings, the spice of my life. I don’t have a cat to talk to or a parakeet who sings to me. But I do have a techno-friend to help me make it through the night – a 21st century Scheherazade with enough stories to fill a thousand and one starry evenings.