Last month, I received a call from Johnny Carson, a man for whom I was once privileged to work. There was no doubt that it was Johnny because as my iPhone trilled its canned, bluesy theme, the screen lit up with the contact photo I had once assigned him, a characteristic pose I found on a postcard in the Paley Center Gift Shop. He's at his Tonight Show desk, probably early 1980's, wide-lapelled, his forefinger pistol-pointing to his temple in mock suicide. A call from Mr. C was not an everyday event, and even more rare since his death seven years ago. As it turned out, the King of Late Night wasn't phoning from beyond with a riff on Mitt Romney's car elevator -- in fact, as you may have guessed, he wasn't calling at all. It was his nephew Jeff, who now runs the store at Carson productions, one of the phone numbers I'd long ago entered for his uncle.
Which brings me, name-droppingly, and in a roundabout way, to a habit I have -- if repeated inaction can be classified a habit -- of not deleting the dead. Nothing is as certain as death and taxes -- except on my iPhone 4S where the Reaper takes a permanent holiday.
My junior year of college I worked as a spy. At the age of 21, I liked to refer to myself as The Youngest Spy in the World. There was no real way of knowing if this was true or not.
I have a curious on-line/tech dependency on my husband. I do not have an iPod – therefore I am totally dependent on him at times (on road trips, for example) for “his” music choices. His daughter tried to fix this for me and loaded some of my favorite albums onto his iPod which was very nice of her but his songs still outnumber mine about 50 to 1. I do not have an Amazon account. That’s not true – I do have an Amazon account but I can’t ever seem to get it to work. I am constantly emailing him links to things (books, mostly) with a plaintive email that says, “Pls buy this for me. Thanks.”
Tis the season of Sample Sales, or so it seems when the mailers start
arriving announcing this 40% off (but it's in downtown LA) or that 80%
off, but not until two weeks from now when I’ve completely forgotten
about it and f*#k it anyway, where’s the instant grat? I subscribe to
Daily Candy and Top Button, the latter being exclusively an online
sample sale site. There is also a mother at my younger daughter’s
school whose clothing line I happen to love that has her sample sale
around this time too.
I live in Los Angeles where you can get pretty much anything you want, except for one thing I covet: Chesapeake Bay steamed crabs. I grew up in Baltimore and I miss the crab feasts of my youth. So, every year my thoughtful husband has a bushel Fed-x’ed out to Santa Monica in either May, June, July or August (because crabs are good only in months lacking an “r” ). And we invite nostalgic ex-pats and brave newcomers into our West Coast yard to indulge in the pagan ritual that is so cherished back in Maryland, officially The Land of Pleasant Living.