My father-in-law likes to say college was the best four-year vacation he ever sent his daughter on.
I can’t verify that. I didn’t know my wife when she attended the University of Tennessee some 30-plus years ago, but from the accounts of her school friends, she had a great educational and social experience.
Always the name-dropper, Lindsay has mentioned frequently how as a college coed she once met and talked with pop singer Al Stewart at a hotel bar in Knoxville.
I’ve never pressed the real issue here: What was she doing at a hotel bar?
But I am fascinated that she met Stewart, an Englishman probably best known for his ’70s songs “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages.”
The radio station I listened to at Penn State seemed to play “Year of the Cat” every two hours, until I couldn’t stand it. Year of the Cat? Was that something Stewart found on a Chinese restaurant placemat?
I reached the point I would turn off the radio when I heard the song’s familiar intro, or caught it in the middle of its saxophone solo.
So I surprised myself a couple weeks ago when I plopped down $13.99 for the “Al Stewart’s Greatest Hits” CD featuring, yes, “Year of the Cat.”
I’ll blame nostalgia for my transgression. “Year of the Cat” made references to Peter Lorre, a Bogart movie, “blue tiled walls near the market stalls” and a lobster ticket. Maybe by hearing it again, I thought, I would understand it better, thanks to age and having sent my own kids on their college vacations.
It turns out there’s no mention of a “lobster ticket” in the song. All these years, Stewart was saying “lost your ticket,” and my brain translated the phrase to “lobster ticket.”
“Lost your ticket” makes a lot more sense, of course. What would a lobster ticket be, something you hand to a waitress before she brings a lobster and corn on the cob to your table?
“Thank you, and here’s my lobster ticket.”
I also have learned the Chinese calendar of 12 animals does not include a year for the cat, though Vietnamese astrology apparently does provide for one. So I’ve decided to proclaim 2009 as the “Year of the Cat.”
It will be a good year. Everything that goes wrong can be blamed on the economy. Everything that goes right can be credited to Barack Obama or Al Franken. (Maybe this is finally going to be “The Year of Al Franken” that he once proclaimed on “Saturday Night Live.”)
My Year of the Cat has begun early with the return of our youngest son from his semester of studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary.
The first thing young Benn requested when we met him at the Charlotte airport was a meal at the closest Bojangles. He had been craving spicy chicken, Cajun fries, made-from-scratch biscuits and sweet tea for months. Hungarian goulash only goes so far.
We traveled to the Bojangles that rattles intermittently from the jets coming in for a landing. Then everyone chowed down on some kind of “supreme” picnic as we heard all about the best vacation we had ever sent him on.
Meanwhile, I kept looking around, waiting for someone to ask for my lobster ticket.