Eek, I did it again

The audience of four or five that reads my blog when prompted to, because it knows that I won't shut up and leave it alone until it does, is familiar with a posting I put up last February, It Ain't Over 'til The Fat Guy Dies. http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/2006/02/it-aint-over-til-fat-guy-dies.html

In that posting, I discussed the odd phenomenon that every now and then I'll be thinking about a certain person, usually a celebrity, and within a day or two I see that person's obituary in the news.

Just call me the Accidental Reaper. Or The Reaper Unaware.

And it just happened again.

Check out the photo, above right. That is correct, movie buffs. June Allyson, the "Perfect Wife" of all those World War II-era movies, died Saturday at her home in Ojai, CA. She was 88.

I don't know what precise time she died on Saturday, but I shouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it was sometime between 1:15 and 2:15 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time.

That's because I was uttering her name, out loud, at that very moment.

Okay, scoffers, scoff away. Just remember that I've experienced this spooky confluence of events, e.g., I think of 'em and then they die, more than once.

Mystics, heads up. We could be talking about a chicken-and-egg thing here: perhaps it's not that my thinking of them bumps them off, but that I have a psychic strain in me that I don't know about and somehow, when one of these celebs checks out for the Great Studio Commissary In The Sky, their departing shade twangs a chord in the universe that somehow one of my neurons is tuned into. I don't know. Could be the same reason I think of the Andy Griffith Show episode about the goat that ate the dynamite, and then find that that very episode is being played on TV Land that very same day. That's also happened plenty of times.

And yes, it could be just a case of heuristic rock-skipping--one thought leads to another thought, which leads to a name, and every once in a seventh-son-of-the-seventh-son blue moon, they all come together in one great crash of coincidence. No causation, just two flies hovering in St. Paul's Cathedral that manage to bump into each other. Don't know. Probably never will. But here's what happened.

On Saturday, July 8, I was driving to Post Falls, Idaho from Spokane, Washington on a routine "liquor run." Liquor is cheaper in Idaho than in Washington, so I buy my liquor there. Why not? Post Falls is only 25 minutes from Spokane; I can drive over there, buy a jug and drive back in one hour.

While cruising along Interstate 90 toward the Washington-Idaho border, I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to Spokane's jazz station, KEWU, broadcasting from Eastern Washington University. On Saturday afternoons KEWU regularly broadcasts a program of pop tunes from the 1930s and '40s. Hearing this World War II music made me think of a radio documentary about those years in America, The Home Front, which was broadcast in the early 1970s. My Aunt, Jessie Billon, who died a few years ago, once gave me a set of cassette tapes on which she had copied this entire documentary. She wanted to share it with me. My Aunt Jessie, you see, and her husband, my Uncle Pete Billon, also dead now, were what you might call "World War II kids." They were married, when both were still quite young, in 1944.

Uncle Pete was a civilian pilot in the war. He would have served in the military, but was classified 4F due to back problems. Instead, an already accomplished, passionate flyer, he signed on with the China National Air Corp and flew cargo planes betweeen India and China. That was before my time, but I saw the photographs. When I got to know him, (I was born long after the war) he was with United Airlines: for 26 years he flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu. Uncle Pete loved to fly. It was his life. (You wouldn't think I was his nephew, by the way -- I hate to get anywhere near an airplane. I fly when I have to, but I hate it. I'd rather travel by train any time.)

Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, for understandable reasons, had a nostalgic weakness for that period, which some others who lived through it, my parents for example, did not. For Jessie and Pete, the WWII years were the years of youth, beauty, love, romance, marriage. Never mind Hitler: they were young and healthy and my Aunt Jessie was beautiful. I know because I saw a picture. In fact I saw it often. In fact that picture is burned into my brain.

My grandmother had pictures of all her children around the house of course, and when we would visit her, we kids would see those pictures. Atop the piano were a photo of my mother, (also quite beautiful) and one of Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken either on their wedding day or right after. There he is in his dapper uniform; there she is, in a WWII-era print dress, with a WWII-era hairdo. Both are beaming. Aunt Jessie remembered that the judge who married them had taken one look at their ages on the marriage license and harrumphed, "Hmmph. Just a couple of kids!" A genuine harrumph.

The music made me think of the documentary, the documentary made me think of my late aunt and uncle, and the combination of the two made me think of that picture.

Now here comes the "combination of the three" moment: I tried to think of an appropriate descriptive phrase to place that old photo in perspective. "It looks like something from a June Allyson movie," I thought. Then I thought it again. Now, confession time: I KNOW that most people talk to themselves in their cars, but I'm going to admit, openly, that I actually do it. I said it OUT LOUD, with no one there to hear but myself, the radio and the dashboard: "That picture looked like something out of a June Allyson movie." Well, yeah, I always thought my Aunt Jessie looked a tiny bit like June Allyson, but the point is, I thought the thought, and said it out loud. Because it wasn't just a question of my aunt's slight resemblance to June Allyson. It was the whole ball of WWII-era wax: the music, the photo, the memory of that set of documentary tapes. I also remembered that my aunt and uncle, again completely unlike my parents, were inordinately fond of the music of that era: Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Sinatra, Peggy Lee and all the rest of it. June Allyson was inextricably a part of all that, and the kind of actress more likely to be in an imaginary wedding photo with a dashing young flyer than the Rita Hayworths, Betty Grables and Hedy Lamarrs of that era. Those gals all ended up on the inside doors of GI lockers. June Allyson, as her obituary noted, was the one the boys dreamed of bringing home to meet their parents.

That was Saturday. On Monday I saw June Allyson's obituary on Yahoo.com.

Like I said, scoff away. But I'll tell you what: perhaps, as a public service, I should set up a new blog on which I will post the names of celebrities I've been thinking about today. If you're a celebrity, not dead yet, and your name happens to pop up on that list, you might want to make a quick check and see if your affairs are in order.

That is, if you're not already dead.