Oh, It's Love, Etc

by HANNAH SMITH

HANNAH SMITH, who was brought up in the Middle West, now lives in Arcadia, California. She is the author of an amusing autobiography, For Heaven’s Sake {Atlantic—Little, Brown).

THIS will probably stake me down firmly for good and all as a member of the Serutan set, but I’d like to announce that lately I’ve been awfully fed up with L-O-V-E. I don’t mean by this that I’m not passionately fond of my husband, children, friends, and even many of my relatives. What I’m saying is that I do wish all those unhappy boys and girls on radio, phonograph, and television could get back together, mend their broken/foo1ish/emply/burning/or cold, cold hearts; dry their scalding/ lonely/oceans of/or wasted tears; give each other one more chance/that hatful of dreams/those lyin’ letters/a little kiss, and buy a house and settle down, leaving the air waves to Eric Sevareid, Mary Margaret McBride, and others who aren’t having so many emotional problems.

I particularly wish this at 6:45 each morning when I lunge dazedly out of bed at command of our clock radio, pull on my robe, grope for my house slippers, and come staggering up, feeling as gray and fuzzy as the blanket lint in my eyebrows, only to be met by a badly misinformed baritone who croons that I am “younger than springtime.”

My idea of a good post-dawn radio program is either somebody being bright and folksy about the News, to cheer me up, or — preferably — somebody being gloomy and dismal about the News, to share my mood and confirm my opinion of the world at that moment.

At 6:45, I’d just rather not hear a maraschino tenor declare that it hurts him to his heart that we two gotta part. If he only knew, we aren’t part ing anyway. The acoustics in t his house being what they are, I’ll still be able to hear him w hile I’m washing my face, brushing my teeth, and later while I’m making the coffee. While he sobs, “Two Hearts, Two Kisses,” I’ll be scrambling six eggs and burning four slices of toast. I can’t help feeling that this boy’s problem is chiefly one of timing; the girl he’s torching for is probably still out like a light, and he’s not singing Our Song at all. If he wants to send me, he should try

“All I want is coffee, my delicate flower;

You go flop back in bed for another half hour.”

Have you noticed that, percentagewise, the song writers are working for a small, overprivileged minority? I keep reading every few days that the population in this country is getting older and older. The last time I looked, the average age was pushing 58.2 or something like that, but the boys in Tin Pan Alley keep right on rhyming “darling Irene” with “sixteen.” Manufacturers have seen the light and switched over from pink crib-spreads to gray hug-metights. Firms that once made teething rings have retooled and are on double shift turning out nightstand racks for dentures and hearing aids. Retirement Villas and Sunset Clubs are springing up everywhere.

You’d think that a few of the more alert song writers would bend to t he trend. There must be some geriatric Gershwin who can run up a few hits that will put a tender gleam behind a bifocal or set a black correct ive oxford to tapping madly. Maybe something on this order: —

“Oh, we put the kids through college; sing tra-la-la,

Let’s sit in the sunshine in St. Augustine, Fla.”

Hardly any of the present popular songs seem to fit the exigencies of normal living. Instead of “Let’s Make the Most of Tonight” or “Come On-a My House,” I could use a good loud record that goes like this: —

“Let those bright lights glitter;

We can’t go out — no baby sitter.”

Or: —

“ Don’t come on-a our house, pal o’ mine;

We plan to go to bed at half past nine.”

There have been a few songs that are, perhaps, vaguely slanted in the right direction for the great mass of us who have got past the “Cry Me a River” phase. “Turn the Lights Down Low,” for example, would appeal to my husband as a step in the right direction. However, he’d really go for something more on this order: —

Even the geography in a lot of these songs could be updated to suit the trend. For example, I’ve been told that April in Portugal can be almighty chilly. A good friend of ours, a visual education teacher on her sabbatical, a fine girl of about forty-seven, said she nearly froze last spring in Lisbon. There may have been a moon over the cathedral, but her apartment didn’t have central heating and the whole experience really played hob with her entire respiratory system. The last I heard she was spending November in Nyack, if there happens to be a song writer listening.