(An earworm, if you're not familiar with the term, is when a song gets stuck in your head and keeps playing over and over.)

At least I think an earworm must be camping out on the night table because the last few nights every time I wake during the night "Ode to Billy Joe" is going through my head. Probably because yesterday was the Third of June, and that's how the song starts. In fact, I remember looking at my calendar on Sunday and seeing the date for Tuesday and thinking, "It was the third of June, another sleepy dusty Delta day." That's when it started. Last night, lying awake and hearing the song in my head I decided to relax and enjoy it. I started thinking about what a great example of story telling, and of writing, it is. It's spare, and simple. She shows and doesn't tell. She implies deep emotion but all we hear are the simple things that people say to each other around the dinner table.

It was the third of June, another steamy sunny midwest day three years ago that my mother took a sudden turn for the worse. She died on June 6th. Which this year is the 40th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death. I remember telling her about his death on the telephone, calling her from a girlfriend's house where we had just heard the news on TV. My mother was also a fan of "Ode to Billy Joe."

Here, begging the pardon of the copyright police, are the lyrics to Ode to Billy Joe, by Bobbie Gentry:

"It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet"
And then she said "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge"
"Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
"Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please"
"There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"
And Mama said it was shame about Billy Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billy Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?
"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don't seem right"
"I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge"
"And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

And Mama said to me "Child, what's happened to your appetite?"
"I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite"
"That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today"
"Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way"
"He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge"
"And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

A year has come 'n' gone since we heard the news 'bout Billy Joe
And Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus going 'round, Papa caught it and he died last Spring
And now Mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge

And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

In addition to my continuing crush on the books on Angela Thirkell I am reading a very different author, Studs Terkel. Specifically his "Hard times; an oral history of the great depression." It was written or rather compiled in about 1970, when many of the people who lived through the Depression were still relatively young. And it is scary and sad. Reading about the suffering, brutality, and desperation of that time makes me pray that the current conditions do not bring us to the brink of something worse.

I say my continuing crush on Thirkell, but it is actually a renewed crush after a brief interlude of being mad at her characters for their Tory inclinations. Then I decided that they couldn't help it, and Thirkell's tone is sardonic enough to balance the conservatism of the people and time she writes about, and that her books are too wonderful and comforting to give up. I'm now reading "Never Too Late." It follows "Enter Sir Robert," which was cute because Sir Robert, while being discussed by many of the characters throughout the book, did not actually enter until the last sentence of the last page.

Whatever you are reading, I hope it is making you happy.

I'm rotating among reading Hillary Clinton's book (Living History). Barack Obama's (Audacity of Hope) and Jim Hightower's If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote they Would have Given Us Candidates. Hightower is the most entertaining. He takes a dim view of the whole political establishment and says so with supporting facts and figures and colorful anecdotes. Hillary and Barack are so earnest that it's almost painful. Not that I'm against Earnestness.

I know that I'm not the only one who is already sick of the whole thing. And not the only one who feels pessimistic about the fate of our nation. I may need to switch to something sweet and light to escape becoming a curmudgeon. Does earnest consideration of the candidates really improve one?

Winter is hard, isn't it? Let's just face it, and not beat ourselves up because our winters are so much easier than those of our ancestors, or on the other hand be hard on ourselves because we're not doing what needs to be done. Winter is for hibernating, at least to the extent we can and still meet the minimum obligations of work, society and hygiene. We can't roll ourselves up in a nest of leaves like a dormouse, but we can read things that will quiet and soothe and delight us.

I would like to recommend Angela Thirkell. She will do all those things for you. Her first Barsetshire book, High Rising, is on the night table now. She is like a more gentle, realistic, feminine version of P.G. Wodehouse. She wrote about small English villages in the time before the Internet or even computers. She is funny enough to make you laugh out loud and startle the cats.

Whatever you are doing with your winter, I hope you are well and warm.

Minor surgery, and only one night, but it was one of the longest nights of my life. I didn't sleep, and had lots of time to think about such things as infirmity, mortality, and why television is so generally bad. Here is a list of the things that were on my hospital table at 5:40 am the next morning::

Plastic water pitcher
5 styrofoam cups. some partly full of water, ice, Sprite or coffee. I asked for the coffee about 4 am when it became clear that sleep was not going to happen.
2 plastic spoons
Pink plastic crescent shaped container for throwing up in (not used, thank God)
Plastic packet of medical supplies: gauze, tape, some sort of hi-tech cream
Box of tissue
Box of gauze pads
Roll of tape
Half pint container of 2% milk
empty can of Sprite
Forward Day by Day for August-October
Small figurine - Super Grover - (the Sesame Street character - brought by a friend with the same name to watch over me.)
Phone
Combination TV remote and nurse call button (the remote had only one button, requiring the user to scroll through all channels before turning off the TV. Thus my meditation on the quality of television.)
Mask for oxygen - not used after the first hour or so.
Arthur Rex by Thomas Berger (I'm still picking away at this.)
Glasses case supplied by the hospital - in a flower print and quilted. Suspect made by a volunteer church lady. Though it was pretty I could not bring myself to keep it - it would ever after remind me of that uncomfortable day and night)

I hope and pray that I will never again have to detail the contents of a hospital night table. And I hope the same for all my readers.