History repeats itself?

I was feeling lousy yesterday so I channeled the spirit of my Grandpa Dave and put on my shoes and went out. (If I were channeling the spirit of my Grandma Jean, I would have put on lipstick and went out, because in her opinion lipstick makes women beautiful) First I had to pick up a few things at the pharmacy, then I drove to Barnes & Noble in search of comedy. Some days, distraction is the only medicine that works, and my favorite distraction is humor, somebody else’s when I don’t feel up to writing my own.

I had this craving for George Carlin. I don’t know, maybe it’s a childhood thing, as comforting to me as the first bite of cinnamon toast and the softness of my cat’s fur. As a precocious ten-year-old, I would steal my father’s Carlin albums and play them for my friend Deanne and we’d laugh ourselves sick repeating the best lines over and over. Like so many of the classics – the Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Doris Day movies, these Carlin bits have a permanent place in my head, somewhere below the ability to make scrambled eggs and somewhere above the place where all that high school French is stored. It only takes a word or two, and I’ve gone back in time, giggling like a kid over the “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” or his reminiscences of growing up Irish Catholic. I’m sure you Firesign Theater or Monty Python fans (myself included) have experienced similar brain tugs – a couple of key memories and you’re singing the Lumberjack song.

So I came home with my two Carlins and a Lewis Black for good measure (he’s about as Carlin-esque as any other working comic right now), did my afternoon PT and while icing down afterward, listened to George’s HBO performance from 2002 or so.

Some of his content and demeanor had changed (how could you not evolve over a career that spans – Christ – more than my whole life?). He’s grown a little bitter, a little grouchy, but the essence of it still made me giggle like a ten-year-old.

And for a while, I felt better.

I couldn’t find the real old stuff on CD – AM/FM, Toledo Window Box, Class Clown – but I don’t know, do I want to listen to them now and possibly spoil the magic that I remembered? What if they aren’t as funny anymore? What if my cinnamon toast isn’t exactly the same as the way my mother made it or, in retrospect, my cat had matted fur and I just imagined it differently?

I’d like to leave those memories unsullied, thanks. Leave them to the left of the one that knows how to tie my shoes and to the right of the memory of the taste of the first Macintosh apple of the season.

Perhaps I could clean house up there and make room for new ones. Get rid of the classified column widths of most of the newspapers in the Northeast and leave space for new novels. Ditch the starting lineup of the ’73 Mets and make room for the way tonight’s sunset will look, filtered through the haze.

And leave that giggling ten-year-old alone. She’s too young to have all those first memories spoiled by reality.