Simon & Garfunkel - "Cecilia" (mp3)
J.G. has a tendency to give names to cars and other inanimate objects (the other day I heard her address her vacuum cleaner as "Dora"), which I've never really done, and I form the kind of sentimental attachments to those sorts objects that inspire me write, say, a 1800-word eulogy for my '89 Ford Taurus (I occasionally referred to it as "Jill" because the first 3 letters of its license place were JLL, but it never really caught on). So when she bought a gold Saturn a few years back, she asked for name ideas from her brother John (who also named one of our cats, Harrison). He suggested Cecilia, after the song, which I think I'd only heard for the first time around the same time, when I fished a Simon & Garfunkel best-of out of a box of CDs Mat was getting rid of one time when he moved. We sang the song in (to?) the car, pretty often, although it didn't really make sense to tell a fairly dependable vehicle that it was breaking your heart and shaking your confidence daily.
J.G. and I just moved to Laurel, Maryland, earlier this week, actually, after 2 years in an apartment in Upper Fells Point/Butchers Hill, one of the safer, less crime-ridden parts of Baltimore that my Dad's lived in for more than half my life. We'd ultimately prefer to stay in that area, and will probably move back in a couple years, but she's starting grad school at College Park in a few weeks and it's a good compromise to move somewhere in between there and Baltimore since I'm keeping my job in the city. But back in late June, just a few weeks before moving out of this neighborhood that I've lived in on and off for so long without anything bad ever happening to me, crime-wise, the car, Cecilia, got stolen. I'm not fishing for sympathy because it was basically a seriously boneheaded move on our part to leave J.G.'s bag, with her keys in it, in the car while we went for a walk in Patterson Park, and we kinda deserved to pay for our negligence. But it was still pretty shocking to find that our car had been stolen in broad daylight, right in front of our apartment, when we'd just parked the car less than 45 minutes prior.
J.G. had bought a new car (and named it Chloey) a couple months earlier, and had let me drive Cecilia with the intention of selling me the car at some point down the road when it became the most convenient to transfer ownership. So while it was kinda my car in practice, it was still hers in every other sense and all the police reports and insurance issues after the theft were, unfortunately, primarily her headaches to be had. Amazingly, the car turned up less than 2 weeks later, on July 4th, with only one broken window and some other minor damages, although it took nearly three additional weeks to get it from a city impound lot to a body shop and to get an estimate and have the insurance company cover repairs, so we didn't actually get Cecilia back until last week. The thieves left cigarette burns in the seats, but amazingly left all but 2 of my dozen CDs in the glove compartment, and actually left a bunch of CD-r's in the car (mostly Lil Boosie/Webbie mixtapes, which I've enjoyed listening to lately, and also a scratched up porn DVD). Needless to say, the car's namesake song started to sound a little more poignant after this whole ordeal, from the "begging you please to come home" parts to the final jubilant refrain of "jubilaaaaaation." It's good to have Cecilia back.
J.G. has a tendency to give names to cars and other inanimate objects (the other day I heard her address her vacuum cleaner as "Dora"), which I've never really done, and I form the kind of sentimental attachments to those sorts objects that inspire me write, say, a 1800-word eulogy for my '89 Ford Taurus (I occasionally referred to it as "Jill" because the first 3 letters of its license place were JLL, but it never really caught on). So when she bought a gold Saturn a few years back, she asked for name ideas from her brother John (who also named one of our cats, Harrison). He suggested Cecilia, after the song, which I think I'd only heard for the first time around the same time, when I fished a Simon & Garfunkel best-of out of a box of CDs Mat was getting rid of one time when he moved. We sang the song in (to?) the car, pretty often, although it didn't really make sense to tell a fairly dependable vehicle that it was breaking your heart and shaking your confidence daily.
J.G. and I just moved to Laurel, Maryland, earlier this week, actually, after 2 years in an apartment in Upper Fells Point/Butchers Hill, one of the safer, less crime-ridden parts of Baltimore that my Dad's lived in for more than half my life. We'd ultimately prefer to stay in that area, and will probably move back in a couple years, but she's starting grad school at College Park in a few weeks and it's a good compromise to move somewhere in between there and Baltimore since I'm keeping my job in the city. But back in late June, just a few weeks before moving out of this neighborhood that I've lived in on and off for so long without anything bad ever happening to me, crime-wise, the car, Cecilia, got stolen. I'm not fishing for sympathy because it was basically a seriously boneheaded move on our part to leave J.G.'s bag, with her keys in it, in the car while we went for a walk in Patterson Park, and we kinda deserved to pay for our negligence. But it was still pretty shocking to find that our car had been stolen in broad daylight, right in front of our apartment, when we'd just parked the car less than 45 minutes prior.
J.G. had bought a new car (and named it Chloey) a couple months earlier, and had let me drive Cecilia with the intention of selling me the car at some point down the road when it became the most convenient to transfer ownership. So while it was kinda my car in practice, it was still hers in every other sense and all the police reports and insurance issues after the theft were, unfortunately, primarily her headaches to be had. Amazingly, the car turned up less than 2 weeks later, on July 4th, with only one broken window and some other minor damages, although it took nearly three additional weeks to get it from a city impound lot to a body shop and to get an estimate and have the insurance company cover repairs, so we didn't actually get Cecilia back until last week. The thieves left cigarette burns in the seats, but amazingly left all but 2 of my dozen CDs in the glove compartment, and actually left a bunch of CD-r's in the car (mostly Lil Boosie/Webbie mixtapes, which I've enjoyed listening to lately, and also a scratched up porn DVD). Needless to say, the car's namesake song started to sound a little more poignant after this whole ordeal, from the "begging you please to come home" parts to the final jubilant refrain of "jubilaaaaaation." It's good to have Cecilia back.
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on Friday, August 03, 2007 at 4:25 PM.
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