Sam Discusses Neil Diamond

Oh, we're happy today. We're just as busy as we usually would be on a Saturday -- maybe more so -- but we FEEL like we're not busy, because I'm not going to work on Monday, so we don't have to make sure to rest. Odd, how resting up on the weekends uses up so much precious time. Sam's out fixing the birdfeeder, which once again the squirrels, who are wily in the short run ("look, food! let's get it at any cost!") but dumb in the long run ("oops, broke the feeder again!"), have squashed into oblivion, and then he's going to finish raking leaves. The child, who's not generally allowed to watch a lot of TV, is dutifully sitting in front of it, rotting his much-too-fertile-brain with cartoons, as his mother told him she watched cartoons every Saturday of her childhood and it clearly hadn't done enough damage to her (I gather he thinks that somehow watching LooneyTunes causes one to learn Latin and Anglo-Saxon). And I am killing dust mites in the washing machine, and getting ready to go meet my local knitting blogger cohort, and buy yarn, knitting books, and needles from her at my Local Yarn Shop.

Yep, nice day, and it's not cold or rainy either. Blessings on whoever thought this up.

Got home the other day and Sam, who's generally extremely busy with reading Trollope and teaching the child to play poker, had clearly spent way too much time listening to WJAS, as he announced that Neil Diamond's lovers sleep in weird places.

His example:

She was morning
And I was night time
I one day woke up
To find her lying
Beside my bed. ("Play Me")

Why is she lying beside the bed? he wanted to know. Is she on the floor? Is there some kind of blanket? A rug, even? And what, he asked, about this:

Then come, and as we lay
Beside this sleepy glade
There I will sing to you
My Longfellow serenade. ("Longfellow Serenade")

What exactly, Sam asked, does it mean to lie beside a sleepy glade? Where are they? In the woods? In the lake? On the road way?

Well.

Here's what I want to know: Should I worry about this? Not Neil Diamond, I mean, who's beyond hope, but Sam? Should I buy him some more volumes of Trollope for Christmas? Cause I can't help but feel that applying the tools of literary criticism to Neil Diamond lyrics isn't going to take him very far....