Tag Archives: nostalgia

This dahlia is in a corner at the front of the house. During the summer it gets overheated and the flowers are all fried. But at the end of the season it always has the most beautiful blooms, even after the backyard dahlias are all cold and shriveled.

I was a real magazine junkie back in the day.

Not anymore. There is a lot of good journalism online and we pay for a ton of it. It’s frustrating to click on an article with a paywall since we already pay for so many things. I’m not saying I don’t get it — but we can’t support everything.

But I used to love magazines. It was a treat when you went to the airport and you bought things you normally wouldn’t get so you could read on the plane.

We used to get big fat issues of fashion magazines before school started to look at the new styles. This is funny to me now because we weren’t especially stylish but it was fun to look.

After college I lived a couple blocks away from a giant newsstand in Sherman Oaks, CA. I loved going there. I bought so many rock magazines.

With print there was no algorithm feeding you what it thought you wanted so you’d find things you didn’t expect. I read music, health and wellness stuff, some literary magazines. What would you call Harper’s? For quite a few years around the time I went to Clarion I subscribed to F&SF and Asimov’s. Also so many magazines had short fiction. The dwindling markets for short fiction is a bummer.

I did a quick search to see if there were any poems about persimmons and turns out: there is.

The poet is responsible for the title of this post.

Above is a giant persimmon tree next to the chickens at my cousin’s house. I didn’t even ask so technically we stole them.

My neighbhor across the street also has persimmons and welcomed me to take some.

The light is weird in this picture. The little more orange ones in the back are from my cousin’s and the lighter ones are from across the street.

Mostly I just eat them with my breakfast but I also pulp a few and use them to make persimmon cookies for my husband. It is a nostalgia favorite for him.

This is a close up of one of Archie’s leaves. Archie is a nectaplum and still a baby. This was the second year and it made a handful of tiny little nectaplums that tasted ridiculously delicious. At some point I did some research and I need to spray it to prevent this. I bought the stuff at the nursery and the nice people there explained out to do it. (Or close enough. I can figure it out.) I will start later this month.

I think I was in middle school when I got my first record player.

A single (2 songs) cost about $1 which according to the inflation calculator 1978 -> 2025 is about $5.

I used to pay $5 for a hit song and a b-side. The record store was by the grocery store and when my mom went shopping I would go check the singles and see if I had enough money to buy one. I had a pretty good stack but I can’t remember all the songs. I had Mr. Postman by The Carpenters and I think the Rocky Theme.

Record albums cost around $8 -$10. According to the inflation calculator 1980 -> 2025 is about $31-$40.

Wow. I did not buy a lot of record albums. That was usually what I asked for for Christmas and I would save for a few of my favorites. My first gifted albums were Wings Over America and Frampton Comes Alive. I was also a huge Journey fan and bought some of those myself.

Then we got to the CD years and the music business was never happier because everyone started all over and bought the same music again plus new things.

I think in the beginning CDs cost $12-$15 but people got greedy and at one point new releases were $20. Inflation calculator 1990 -> $30-$37, $50. One of my favorite things was to go to the used CD store where they were more like $7 and pick up things.

I think I wrote about it before but it’s hard to believe I dragged my feet for so long to pay a monthly fee for streaming. I spend less a year now than I did at any previous time and I can listen to almost anything.

The Backstreet Boys are doing a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. They were big in the mid-90s and I was never a huge fan. But a clip from this tour showed up in my social media which is how I know they are still performing together.

I thought I had more posts about the Woo! Girl (Here’s One) but they aren’t coming up in my search.

The Woo! Girl is a person who we have run into at every concert we have ever been to. She’s usually sitting in front of us or behind us and she enthusiastically screams WOO! during the whole show.

When I was younger, I thought the Woo! Girl was there to punish me. But now that I’m older, I love having the Woo! Girl show up and do her thing. We can be Woo! Girls no matter how old we are — the Woo! Girl brings the enthusiasm and joy to the show.

A clip from this tour showed up in my social media and I cracked up when I heard the Woo! Girl still doing her thing.

Screenshot used w/o permission from artist’s youtube

Asia was a super group in the early 80s made up of people that only old people and the stray youth that likes classic prog rock has heard of from Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes. I had their debut on cassette and listened to it a million times in my 1972 Karmann Ghia.

The Internet says there was a second album called Alpha that sounds vaguely familiar but I don’t remember following them after that. The Internet also says the band as remained active almost continuously since 1981. I did not know that and honestly haven’t thought about them in years until I heard them in Fred Meyer last week. Kind of like Gray’s Anatomy — this thing is still on?

I was delighted to be reminded of song. As we were leaving Fred Meyer I said to Bob: Do you think you can find Fred Meyer Friday Morning Playlist on Apple Music?” (I don’t have Spotify.)(I have Apple Music and don’t know how it works or how playlists work. I do manage to pull up obscure music from the 80s and Apple Music tries to find things to recommend based on that.)

I said: Did you hear that song by Asia, the supergroup from the 80s?
Bob said: I did. It was terrible. I wanted it to stop.

The song is called Only Time Will Tell. It starts out with a bright synthesizer opening, like a graduation march, that then slows down into a moving heartfelt ballad about an ending relationship. I remember driving around singing this to myself after my senior year boyfriend dumped me right before prom.

I love it.

Approximately 1990, Hollywood.

Can’t believe it. What a legend.

EDITED TO ADD:

I restarted my memory and came up with the story to go with this picture. The photo was taken at my job where we rented film cameras. This was for a video for Bill Ward who was the original drummer for Black Sabbath.

Here’s the video. You can see Ozzy wearing the jacket in the video:

I got in trouble because they asked us if they could do camera tests in our facility but really they were filming these inserts for the video and didn’t have to pay for it. I was in my 20s and an assistant. What did I know? Where were my supervisors?

We got to hang out with Ozzy for the day. I was too shy to ask for a photo. A colleague asked and that’s how I have the photo.

There’s a Duran Duran documentary on Netflix that I decided to watch last week. And I *LOVED* it.

Wow. The memories. Not just the music, which is really vivid. I bought all three of the first albums and played them to death. Songs that I haven’t thought about in eons popped back into my head, lyrics and all.

But the whole thing. The videos which were on all the time. The fashion. The insane pop stardom. I had photos on my college room wall.

It’s a great documentary. They are so charming now and told a great story.

I never saw the band live. And I never saw Power Station or Arcadia.

Except.

I remembered that I went to an in-store at Licorice Pizza — I want to say this was in Ventura and it was probably 1985. Maybe 1984. I remembered these amazing photos.

We didn’t get inside. We waited around the parking lot and I don’t remember who all was there except for John Taylor. Maybe he was the only one?

Please enjoy these amazing photos of John Taylor. What a day! hehe.

I kept a journal back in those days and I dragged it out and paged through it so see if I could dredge up any details. The info *might* be in there but the journal is terrifying and should be burned. It mostly talks about how badly I thought I needed to lose weight and how much I partied.

FOR PAGES AND PAGES.

I finally joined a streaming thing — I know, what is the opposite of early adopter? I don’t know why the idea of a monthly subscription irks me so much since I used to buy 2-3 albums/CDs or similar media per month. CDs were $15-20 each in the 90s and sometimes I was replacing media I’d already purchased in an earlier format.

But also I hardly ever listen to music anymore. But maybe I will now. Time for my Duran Duran playlist. (Or songlist, as I called it earlier when I was talking to Bob.)

(edited to add: I can’t even do calendars right. Clearly Tuesday was not “the day” — today is the day. Happy Thanksgiving. xo)

Three more posts — I am running out of juice.

Another one of our favorite downtown food carts just ended their business. This has been our go-to burrito cart for years.

There are still a few carts close to the office but the food cart culture is mostly elsewhere these days.

We’ve been going to Fuego (the cart) once a week since we found out they were closing.

Another long gone cart: Go Fish — they had really yummy soup and made these little cheesy biscuit things in the shape of a fish. There was Shelly’s burrito cart. There was the whole giant pod on SW Alder where a fancy hotel/condo building went up and they were supposed to create a space for food carts but mysteriously it hasn’t opened yet.

I had to get a medical test down by the south riverfront (is that what they call this area?) and took a few photos from the hallway. This was a couple of months ago. I completely forgot I had these. This one is looking south — you can see the tram tower. The photo below looks north and you can see the Willamette River.

Bob gave me a book called “We Had A Little Real Estate Problem” (Not an affiliate link, I don’t have those anymore.)

The book is about Native comedians and quite a bit is about Charlie Hill.

At one point, Charlie Hill is in an episode of The Bionic Woman. which I *loved* as a kid. I went and found the episode on Roku channel and watched it.

It aired in the 70s so obviously Charlie is a magical NDN and there is a magical amulet and lot of goofy “my soul your soul” talk that’s super ridiculous. At that age I think I was oblivious to NDN representation in the media. I have no memory of seeing this so I can’t create some tale of how I was moved to see a Native person on TV. The episode was kinda vague — it seemed like they were romantic but the actual words made it like they were friends.

In the comedian book, Charlie said that he and Lindsay were into each other but she was so famous at the time and her handlers discouraged them from having an interracial relationship. Yikes.

It was still fun to watch. I love how Jamie had such amazing hair that she flipped around while doing her bionic things. There is also a moment when she turned around: Ditto jeans! They had a very distinct seam on the butt. I had Ditto jeans! I think I had light blue corduroy Dittos. What a great memory.