"Nice, Nice, Very Nice" - Ambrosia, 1975

"....so many people in the same device."

As regular Lord Celery readers know (do I actually have any regular readers, I wonder...?), my blog entry titles are songs whose lyrics bear some relationship to what I'm writing about that day. But today is different. Today, a song itself has influenced what's on my mind.

That song is "Nice, Nice, Very Nice", the 1975 release by the band Ambrosia. Firstly, I couldn't remember exactly what year the song came out, so I had to look that up online. Once again, it was that influential year 1975...very influential to me, anyway. Funny that so many of the songs I use as Lord Celery entry titles come from that same year. It's the year I started working for Texaco as an crude oil trader. In other words, it's the year I started my very first real live "adult" job...and it began my education in the world of petroleum. I'd been married for less than a year (and, sadly, that marriage didn't work out very well for either of us). I bought my first piano in 1975. I might have even bought my first new car that year. I also began a now-lifelong friendship with Bill (because we worked together at Texaco) and his wife Carole beginning in 1975. I believe that "Saturday Night Live" premiered on NBC TV that year. 1975 was a whopping thirty years ago. "Holy crap!", to quote Peter Boyle's looney character in the TV series "Everybody Loves Raymond"!

I thought, until this morning, that Ambrosia were an English band. Nope. They are from California...and they have the distinction of having been discovered, in 1971, by the conductor Zubin Mehta! I learned that on the Ambrosia page of this West Coast Music Artists website. I had also forgotten, until this morning, that the lyrics for "Nice, Nice, Very Nice" are based on Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "Cat's Cradle".

But I'm getting a bit off-track here...at least considering my original intention when I started writing this morning.

I rode the meandering bus from north Oxfordshire into Oxford city centre this morning. The ride from my village into central Oxford takes just over an hour. My friend Cindy wasn't on the bus with me today, so I entertained myself by listening to a selection of favorite songs on my iRiver MP3 player. "Nice, Nice, Very Nice" was one of the first songs I heard.

"...so many people in the same device."

I'm not a Vonnegut expert, but I've always assumed that the "device" referred to is our planet Earth. But sometimes, I think of the "device" as the airplane within which I'm jetting off to a teaching location...along with loads of other people, traveling to the same destination for their own reasons. This morning, the "device" was Stagecoach's #59 bus. And I was riding with many now-familiar faces. These are people whose names I don't know -- in most cases -- but they are faces I now recognize and smile at and sometimes even chat with.

I'm a long way from my home country, but I'm very much at home here. And I'm very much in love, also. Thank you, my John! Hope you don't mind that you'll be my husband #2! That's just the way it is. (And that's a completely different song, too...!)

Janet

Obviously Listening To: Ambrosia