Unsinkable

Mom took this to submit for a writing contest and no, I didn't know Dennis the Menace was in the shot!

When I was 12, my parents gave me a beautiful, powder blue stereo (BIG deal at the time!). I was the envy of the neighborhood! It had removable speakers! Although Beatlemania was growing faster than my brother Mike's hair, they gave me two other popular albums, one by The Beach Boys and the other by the King, Elvis. I loved them and played them over and over (and over and over). The best feature on the record player was when you lifted the arm, it would just replay the records over and over (and over and over). Not so popular with the folks, however, especially when I played The Eve of Destruction until I wore it out.  So they gave me a gift certificate to purchase additional records. Did I go for the number one record, the smash hit, the Top 40? No. I bought the soundtrack to The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
On my 13th birthday, Mom drew a special birthday card for me with her take on an old joke.  It showed me knee deep shoveling a pile of manure while my family stood by and watched. The speech bubble over my mom's head read, "What are you doing, Bambi?" "Well", my speech bubble proclaimed, "with all this shit, there must be a pony in here somewhere!" .
Once, when something bad had happened, (I don't even recall what it was, so there you are, get over-able!), I was struggling to show how it wasn't so bad. Your dad finally said, "Honey, there is no silver lining here, no matter how badly you want it."
I still want to believe in being unsinkable, I want Pollyanna to live on, I want acts of kindness not to be so random, I want somewhere over the rainbow to be true, I want the little white butterflies to really be you fluttering by, I want the star that shines so bright to be your nightly message...

Trailer for The Unsinkable Molly Brown 1964