Another Pleasant Valley Sunday
I don’t mind outing myself as a Monkees fan. In the 60’s everybody my age was a Monkees fan. And then for thirty years or so I had to secretly hanker for a little Daydream Believer not to mention Another Pleasant Valley Sunday . Now that both Davy Jones and Peter Tork are dearly departed, only Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz are left and between the two they have over 150 years. The Monkees were not significant songwriters and musicians by most standards the way The Beatles or The Rolling Stones were. Both of those vie for top five spots on every Best Rock Bands lists whereas the Monkees make none of the lists, But that doesn’t stop me from fondly remembering the zany TV show and all the hype about how they were formed by the TV studio looking to fabricate a pop group that could make music magic, and that none of them were even really musicians (not true). John Stewart of the Kingston Trio wrote Daydream Believer and none other than Carole King wrote Another Pleasant Valley Sunday. But both Nesmith and Tork were talented musicians in their own right and Dolenz became a decent musician over time. Only Davy was a non-musician unless you count the tambourine. But here’s the odd fact worth remembering. In 1967, when I was thirteen years old, The Monkees outsold The Beatles and The Rolling Stones COMBINED with their not-so-musically-talented albums.
What those songs say to me is both wholesome and about suburban bubblegum lyrics. For those reasons I always loved the songs and I loved the way the Monkees sang them. Whenever they come on the radio (meaning the 60’s Channel on Sirius), I immediately feel better. They also always make me think of Southern California for some reason. And here I am now, living full-time in Southern California. And today was a perfect pleasant valley Sunday. It was 72 degrees with the sun shining through a cloudless sky and a light breeze wafting across the hills. The days don’t come any more perfect than today.
Since today was a Sunday, I felt fine sleeping in until 7am. A lifetime of work ethic fades slowly. I still feel the need to wake early and accomplish things. I start my day in my study watching MSNBC to catch up on the global breaking news. I don’t feel I can afford missing anything in these unusual times. Between the Trump situation, the Coronavirus pandemic, the stalled worldwide economy and the general current state of the world (meaning all the socioeconomic turmoil and shifts that are underway), I don’t feel I can miss a day. I’ve never been a news junkie and I’m not so sure I am one now, but this all seems so important to everything. Its important to my family’s wellbeing. Its important to the companies I do work for and those that I have invested in. It’s important to our American way of life. And it’s important to the entire population of the world…literally to all 8 billion humans on earth and perhaps the rest of the living creatures on the planet as well. And if there is any basis to believe that Earth is as unique in the cosmos as it seems to be from everything we have found out there so far, it’s important to the entire fucking universe. If that’s not enough to get you up in the morning, go ahead and sleep in.
The big event for the day for us was that brother-in-law Jeff and his wife Lisa were coming over for dinner. We decided, less to commemorate the reopening of half the states in the country, and more because we feel that they are now virus-free and we are virus-free and we know we can comport ourselves with proper socially distant protocol. We have two tables on our patio and we set up with two seats at one and two seats at the other. We were about ten feet apart while we ate and we kept our masks on while serving or clearing so as not to cross any biological boundaries. We did let our respective dogs run around and I can’t claim that we didn’t each touch and pet the others’ dogs, so that may not have been maintaining proper procedures. There simply is no perfect handbook other than to suggest that none of this would have likely been enough to pass a cold between us and nothing I have heard or seen suggests that it transmits more easily than the flu or a common cold, just that if it does pass it can particularly nasty in its impact.
The party we have to be particularly careful about is Jeff since he is on both chemotherapy for leukemia and Prednisone for his Rheumatoid Arthritis. As much as he hates to think of himself this way, for the moment anyway he is the most vulnerable one among us. I’m not so sure this Coronavirus is so clearly defined as to be able to say that since there does seem to be some degree of randomness from the stories I’ve read about who gets hit the hardest by the virus. I myself take hypertension meds (both Beta Blocker and ACE Inhibitor) but am otherwise healthy and rarely get sick, but I’ve read things about the higher risk of blood pressure sufferers. Kim is on more meds than I am and has more general vulnerability than I to sniffles and such, but she is otherwise quite healthy. Lisa will probably live to 100 since I’ve never known her to get sick. None of us is so old as to be in the red zone on age, but we are all unwilling to test our luck too much. Nonetheless, none of us felt that this format of a get-together would be a risk any worse than getting mail and going to the grocery store.
We enjoyed a good midwestern dinner in honor of Kim and Jeff’s roots in Indiana. Jeff made pork tenderloins which were breaded and fried in peanut oil. they were delicious (and will be again tomorrow for lunch I suspect). Kim made German potato salad, which was ever so pleasant and sweet with a slight hint of tangy. For desert, Jeff also made a chocolate cake with pistachios on top. It was a great American Sunday dinner sitting under the Palapa that Jeff built for us several years ago, keeping our distance, watching the dogs beg for treats and talking about the uneventful events of our weekends.
This is what we miss the most during this quarantine. This is what we will be most anxious to regain after this is over. We can live without trips to Europe or cruises through the Caribbean. We can do without big stadium events, crowded airports, packed movie theaters, cozy cabaret nightclubs and even college reunions. What we cannot live without is the intimacy of family and close friends. I would trade off all the rest for an assurance that we can gather safely with friends and family in modest sized groups, using better social distancing than before and observing more diligence in illness distancing than we were used to practicing. I want my family to have meaningful work and be able to afford the basic needs of a meaningful life. I want Pleasant Valley Sundays not to feel as though we are being brave and taking risks just to spend time with one another. Face Time and Zoom are wonderful stop-gaps and we use them daily to stay connected because we have no choice at the moment. As the Monkees might say, “Creature comfort goals, they only numb my soul, and make it hard for me to see. Ah, thoughts all seem to stray to places far away. I need a change of scenery.” Just give me Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, and I’ll give you back all the status symbols in the land.