145. Jacob's Ladder

145. "Don't Stand So Close To Me" by The Police

Every summer, from the time I was a baby until around 14 years old, Mom would pack all six or seven kids (depending on how many had been born that year) into the blue Ford LTD and drive to Aunt Elva's for an extended visit of four to five days. The reasons for the long stay were two-fold. First, we loved playing with our cousins toys, which we did NOT have duplicates of at home. Second, according to the unwritten Law of Family Visitation, the longer the trip to get there, the longer the stay had to be.

Now, back in the day when the national speed limit was 55 miles an hour, a trip from Arimo to Sand Hollow (located near the western border of the state just before hitting Oregon) took approximately 17 hours and 13 tanks of gas. Of course, I'm only counting the time it took for me to make the trip. Being the middle kid, I usually had to sit in the middle of the back seat, which nearly triples the time it takes to get anywhere. If I'd had the luxury of sitting next to the window, like my older siblings did, the drive would have taken around 6 hours.

There were three forms of entertainment on these windowless, cross-state treks: listing to the car radio, reading a book, or fighting with siblings, which most often involved arguing over what station to listen to on the radio or hitting one another with books. Such fights were exhausting for everyone, so Mom always took a breather at a rest stop somewhere in the middle of Idaho to refuel us with a picnic lunch of baloney and cheese sandwiches on homemade bread. We washed it all down with water from an old bleach bottle that had been removed from the freezer that morning and was still half-filled with ice. This was our only real source of relief from the heat, as the air conditioning in cars back then was of such limited power that we often had honest arguments over whether or not it would feel cooler to roll down the windows.

Although our drive from Marsh Valley through Magic Valley to the Treasure Valley was fraught with the perils of heat, hunger, and hitting, I still always looked forward to these trips. Why? Because at the end of our three-valley pilgrimage, I got to play with my cousin Randy, who was about one year older than me.

Wait. Did I say "play?" That's really not quite the right word for what we did all day together. Aunt Elva's family lived on a dairy farm, which is why we usually visited them and they rarely visited us. Unlike fields of wheat, milking cows are not something you can just leave behind for a day or two. They've got to be milked twice a day, rain or shine. Consequently, even though we were visitors, we were still expected to help out with the day-long list of chores--milking cows, herding cows, feeding cows, cleaning cowpies out of the milking barn, irrigating alfalfa fields, hand-pollinating row after row after row of corn, feeding pigs, herding pigs, feeding chickens, gathering eggs, feeding rabbits, and catching rabbits that broke loose while we were feeding them. We only got to "play" after we got our chores done. And my favorite game was Caroom--a poor man's version of pool played by using a small cue stick to strike a colored ring so that it collided with other colored rings with the hope that your color of ring would slide into one of the four corner pockets.

Caroom!

I know. I know. It doesn't sound like it's even half as fun as regular pool. But after spending most of the day doing dairy-farm chores, it seemed like the greatest game ever invented. I begged Randy to play it all the time, and he usually obliged, and he usually won. However, the real pleasure of playing the game came from glancing the rings off the sides of the board into a corner pocket--hence the name Caroom!

During the summer of 1981, right after I'd finished the 9th grade, my summer visit to Aunt Elva's marked a change in my relationship with Randy. I became more of a tag-along than a playmate. He tried to ditch me a couple of times by sneaking around corners when I wasn't looking. This made me try to stay really close to him as we did our chores, since I didn't want to have to hunt him down or go back to the house without him, as that would make me look like I was being lazy, and Mom would get mad at me and tell me to get back out and help with the chores.

Because I was trying to stick to Randy like glue, he got annoyed at me on our second day and told me to back off. Then, for the rest of the visit, he would sing "Don't Stand So Close to Me" anytime I got within arm's length. But he wouldn't just sing that chorus line, he'd go on to sing other parts of the song, and he sometimes change the lyrics. He was especially fond of replacing the word "bad" with "fat" in the line "Her friends are so jealous, you know how FAT girls get!"

While I didn't appreciate Randy's repeated musical admonitions of "don't stand so close me," I actually began to like the song because of his singing it. Later that year, when I joined the Columbia Records and Tapes club, as one of my thirteen choices I ordered the Police's third album "Zenyatta Mondatta"--which I believe in the original language of Stingish means "statutory rape."

The commercial success of this song forced these three musical geniuses to create one of the most boring music videos of all time. The only redeeming thing in this visual debacle is the somewhat Stooge-esque dance moves. Here's a tip for producing a quality video, laddies. When a ladder is the most interesting thing in the video--even more interesting than Sting taking off his shirt--it's time to stop filming and come up with another idea for the video.



While I enjoy all of the songs on that album--including the baby-talk titled song "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da"--I've come to accept that my favorite song on the album is "Don't Stand So Close To Me." In spite of the creepy storyline of an English teacher's illicit affair with a sexually precocious teenage student, I can't help but associate it with my fond memories of staying at Aunt Elva's house during the summers of my youth.

Sadly, after that summer Randy introduced me to The Police, his life took a number of turns that put us on much different paths. Because of his drug use, we did not end up the life-long friends that I'd hoped we'd be. And even more sadly, the drugs eventually led to him dying at the age of 40 due to complications of a fungus infection in his lungs. However, the good memories of our times together remain a source of happiness to me. And to this day, whenever I hear "Don't Stand So Close To Me," I turn up the song, think of Randy, and belt out the line "You know how FAT girls get!"