Home Alone -- Canine Version

You think you will never lose your dog. Until the morning when you and the rest of your "loser" family jump into the van and take off in a hurry. For the next half-hour you don't even realize that your 100-lb dog is missing from her usual seat at the back of the van. When you eventually notice, you zip back through the morning traffic, only to find her curled up at the front door step of your home, waiting patiently, trustingly, but with a quizzical look on her face. And when you open the door of the van to tell her it's OK, she can climb in now, she jumps up and bounds towards you, happy to be part of the pack again. Even your youngest child has felt let down by you, and quite frightened, when you unexpectedly had to make your children wait in the after-school program one day. But your once-feral dog--she just accepts that, for whatever reason, the pack was separated, and that's the way tough life is. Why make it tougher? She just nuzzles up to you, the alpha member, touches you gently with her nose and reassures you that all is well that ends well.  
 

Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha!

As a painfully shy kid with no brothers or boy cousins and with little chance of meeting and interacting boys, as I had gone to an all-girls' school, I was both curious about boys and scared of them. They were aliens as far as I was concerned. So when I heard Cliff Richard's song 'Goodbye Sam, hello Samantha' in my teens in the '80s, I loved it! The song validated and put into perspective my own ignorance of matters of the opposite sex, albeit in a 180 degree manner.  I dug it up yesterday when my children -- two pre-teen girls and a boy -- were having a friendly girls vs. boys argument. As expected, there were giggles, incredulous looks, 'what? no waaayyyy!' type of protests. They are still at an age when it is hard to imagine that a member of the opposite sex will really, truly steal you away from everything that matters to you and your kind -- whatever that means in this somewhat (relatively speaking) post-gender segregation era. 



Then this afternoon, my husband got in on the family conversation, which by now is about the song itself rather than about the mysteries of the opposite sex. There is a lot of humor embedded in this song, is the obvious adult consensus. (Of course, the kids can't deny that either, as evidenced by the giggles of a particular eight-year old.) Additionally, my husband thinks it is a song that may have raised no eyebrows then, but perhaps would be considered as too earnest, too innocent, too cheesy, no street cred whatsoever.  It is so straightforward and simple in its innocence and therefore would not do an easy cakewalk in our more-cynical times. He may have a point. We came up with two more songs that sound like they will be subjected to some scrutiny in today's world, even though they are both full of light-hearted humor.  Here are those songs:

Abba's 'Does your mother know?' (which I love whole-heartedly). 

'Save all your kisses for me' by Brotherhood of man.