Yabadoo Time
SS106 - Yabadabadoo Time / 01_origEmail
No one was watching the moon shoot out of the hilltop. No one was listening to the frogs, crickets, whipporwills, owls and one hundred kinds of bugs except themselves. We were all in the lit-up house. At this time, several of us had just finished watching the closing credits of The Flintstones.
One of my sisters walked to the kitchen with her empty ice cream bowl, happily singing, “We’ll have a gay all time.”
I corrected her on that point. “We’ll have a gay old time,” I sang.
“Gay all time,” she repeated.
I went into the kitchen. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, sounding grouchy to make clear that my singing of the Flintstones theme song a moment before had been a matter of presenting evidence only.
“It’s what they say,” she said.
“”Gay old time’ is a normal English phrase. The way you’re saying it, no one would ever say.”
“They would on a cartoon.”
She looked at me like someone trying to brush something off their shoulder with their chin — pure gloating — and went back to the living room. At that point in time I was fighting mad.
“Oh yeah?” I said, right behind her. If there’s one thing I have hated since I was old enough to know what it was I hated, it’s someone rubbing it in about how right they are, but especially when they’re wrong.
“Let me explain something to you,” I said. “The Flintstones is a cartoon, but the people singing about the Flintstones at the beginning and end of the show aren’t. They’re singers in a room somewhere with microphones. People with shoes. They’re trying to make us watch The Flintstones. Maybe Wilma or Ethel would say something like, ‘gay all time,’ but...”
“More like Barney or Fred.”
“But the people who make the show are real people trying to communicate with other real people. Maybe you want to live in a cartoon world where nothing has to make sense, but the rest of us...”
“I guess dabadoo’s a normal English phrase,” she said, and sang again. “We’ll have a yabadoo time. A dabadoo time. We’ll have a gay all time!”
A sort of scary feeling went through me. It felt like any other scariness, but somehow still felt like a new category of scariness. At that point in my life I had not yet figured out that there are only a few kinds of sensations available to the inner chest and stomach areas. That those two or three notes, when played by the locked-in-a-closet jazz combo of one’s internal organs, can be used to produce quite a few different numbers.
“Anyone who doesn’t want to go crazy’s is going to ignore you,” I told my sister. “So get ready for it.”
I saw her ghostly face as I turned and walked blithely down the steps, shaking my head as if I’d won the argument. I went outside and stood in the yard. The house looked like a houseboat all lit up in a black lagoon somewhere. The music of The Jetsons was now playing on the TV. I went farther across the yard to, in effect, turn the TV down, and I began to hear the animals and bugs again.
It was easy to imagine our house as sitting at anchor offshore from some jungle island. What was I then? The thoughtful and discontented son of the captain, gone for a solitary night swim in the nameless black bay? I alone of all my kind seeing us for what we really were, arrogant intruders from the ridiculous world of civilization, lolllng ignorantly at the threshold of some place wild and everlasting?
Treading water out there alone, my naked body exposed to anything alive or dead that might have an interest.
Which reminded me that just out there in the darkness — not in the sense of being near a jungle, but in the real sense of being in the valley of Holiday Ranch — just down the hill and across the thin strip of blacktop road was the farmhouse with its verifiable ghosts, and just in back of the farmhouse, inside the falling rusty fence, the little cemetery.
I started back toward the house at a calm gait, but in a moment I was running, and there was that feeling inside my chest and guts again, the same feeling as before, only now it felt good. It felt like when you’re singing out of songbooks and you come to a chorus everyone loves and all the notes are easy to hit and suddenly everyone, you included, can just just open up and sing away like there’s no tomorrow. Yes, exactly that. That’s what it felt like, running back to the house in the dark.