The dog and I took our daily constitutional yesterday, to find a Music in the Park event taking place.  We sat on the steps to listen, chatting with strangers through the boring bits.  It was a Stockport celebration of that great American tradition, July 4^th.  No fireworks or the delicious Will Smith in sight, but there were hamburgers and hot dogs on sale and the music was mostly great fun, especially the ukuleles, banjos and board sticks (a sort of flat version of castanets but played by old men in boaters and spangled waistcoats instead of beautiful Spaniards in filly frocks).  You might think I’m going to talk about bluegrass now, but you’d be wrong.  No, the music was provided in part by that great American institution, the George Formby Society: a bunch of blokes with a combined age that would see them at the dawn of civilisation, never mind of the American nation.  There was one woman, age indeterminate, who banged away at her banjo like she was a reincarnation of the great man himself, only not as handsome.  The absurdity of their presence aside, they were wonderful.  I found myself singing along despite my antipathy for Mr F – not his music, exactly, but the fact that he has an annoying voice that becomes ever more annoying the more I hear it; and I hear it a lot, because my menfolk are all huge fans.  The GFS were topped only by the choir who sang another typical American Independence Day song, On Ilkley Moor Baht’at.

There are all kinds of independences.  I myself am independent of my parents, being a poor orphan child since losing my Mum last year.  It sucks.  I wish she was still here to worry about me and criticise me and buy me things I don’t need or can’t afford and have me running around after her when I should be doing so many other things that her latest hospitalisation has forced me to put on hold.  I mention it because she would have been 74 today. 

Here’s a senryu for you:

 On Being Orphaned

 Mum died.  I packed her

clothes into black bin bags for

charity, and cried.

© Tilly Bud and The Laughing Housewife, 2009.