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Our high school boasted a modest but thriving foreign exchange program. Year after year, a small group of students from various mostly European countries would take up residence in our tiny district, eager to learn what it meant to be in America. I’m not sure living in Podunk, Maine, gave them such a great perspective — I always felt sort of bad for them, like maybe they’d drawn last in the exchange student lottery or something. But for us, it was a breath of fresh air to have them in our midst.
Excited as I was to have these visitors around, I think I always thought of them as vaguely untouchable and on some higher plane — they were European, after all, and schooled in the ways of the world. With the exception of one hilarious Greek boy who became fast friends with our small circle, I was never particularly close to any of them. But I do have little snapshots tucked away, it turns out. Hearing “Don’t Turn Around” this morning transported me to our high-school gym. Just outside the locker room, talking with the blonde German girl about how much she loved … Roxette?
Yes, there is a flaw in this memory. In the car, I was able to correctly lump “Don’t Turn Around,” “I Saw the Sign,” and “All That She Wants Is Another Baby” together as by the same group. But I had the wrong group.
It’s possible that the German girl actually loved Ace of Base, and that’s what we were discussing that day. Or perhaps it was Roxette after all. Turns out they’re both Swedish, so they must live in the same file drawer in my brain. (Move over, ABBA.)
I’ll never know which it was, and I doubt the German girl would remember, could I even begin to track her down. This blog is beginning to reveal great gaps in my mental cache. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Perhaps, as Ace of Base commands and as TGOTS said in her lovely post today, the way to gaze is forward instead.
Hello, friends! While I am less than thrilled to be sitting in my office this morning, I am happy to be back to the Auto Tunes. This blog has been one of my favorite things about 2009.
I was in Maine with my family for Christmas, and had, overall, a nice (and often musical) time. My young niece perked up every time she heard music, often saying one pop song or another on the radio or in a store was her mom’s “favorite.” Saw The Princess and the Frog and enjoyed all the N’awlins sounds — gospel, jazz, zydeco, etc. — on the soundtrack. Went to church in my parents’ new town on Christmas Eve, and despite a lackluster service, again burst into tears at the congregational singing of “Silent Night” — unbidden, uncontrollable weeping.
Today, New Year’s Eve, kind of snuck up on me, given all the madness of Christmas and cross-country travel. We’ll close out 2009 and all of the aughts tonight, and I am ready. More than ready.
I moved to my last city in the summer of 2000 and left it in the summer of 2009, meaning the aughts have, for me, very clear and defined bookends. And the decade was not, for me, one of the happiest. I often felt stuck, frustrated, aimless, and even hopeless. I felt as though somewhere along the line, I’d lost the thread of my life, and given too much time and heart and energy to the wrong things. Even though, in those years, I made friendships that I cherished and will cherish always, I too often felt lost in a threatening wilderness. Even worse, I feared it was a wilderness of my own making.
Luckily, the chance for a geographical move arrived in the spring of ’09, and in early June I moved on, moved forward, moved one step closer to a new mental/emotional/spiritual state, toward something like happiness.
I thought about all this as I drove to work this morning, five minutes of my commute backed by Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” The song is of the sort that is (as documented repeatedly in these pages) right up my alley: operatic, overwrought, joyful and triumphant (ironic lyrics aside).
That is how I want to feel in the year and decade ahead. Joyful and triumphant. I want to continue to collect the most wonderful and amazing people and call them my friends. I want to keep hacking the path out of the wilderness and create my own refuge of security and warmth. I want hope and redeeming grace.
That’s not too much to ask, right?
Happy new year, friends. Viva la vida.
Today I found myself in a hair salon talking about George Clooney. Now that is the life.
I’m on Christmas vacation still, technically, although I have to say there’s little about life with a toddler that qualifies as a vacation. So today I sent the young pup to daycare and took a day to myself. Full of guilt, but also knowing how mentally necessary it was, I spent 6.5 hours alone. During that time I did the following: Went to see Up in the Air. Sat (!) and read (!) the new Barbara Kingsolver book. And finally, after 2.5 years, got my hair cut.
Oh bliss.
On the way to and from the movie, I of course scanned. Actually, that’s a lie. After my matinee, fully relaxed, meandering homeward in the sun, with the heat cranked on high, I left the radio on an Easy Listening station.
I am always alarmed when these stations provide so many wonderful songs in a row. Same goes for the Easy Listening section in any music store. Apparently I’m Easy … like Sunday morning. (No smart remarks, TGOTS.)
Anyhow I heard any number of songs that would make good fodder for posts, and my mind was all over the place. But since I’ve already rambled on too long, I’ll keep it short: When I hear “Bette Davis Eyes,” I think Kim Carnes, who in my head looks like Kim Basinger, and then I think of Kim Cattrall, and then I think of Betty from the Archie comics, and they all roll into this one lovely woman with long blonde hair, and then I refocus and remember we’re talking about Bette Davis here, all dark-haired and squinchy.
That’s about as deep as it gets, which was fine for this sunny day off.
We’re only two days back from our Christmas trip to Vermont. As predicted in my earlier post, many things about that trip went according to a certain routine. But much of the music was missing. The most glaring example was that my parents did not, according to 35 to 40 years of tradition, blast “The Messiah” on Christmas Eve after I went to bed. Only then, as I lay there in silence, did I realize how much of my anticipation, glee,and general Christmas Eve-ishness is tied up in hearing the strains of that piece.
Music. Emotion. Memories. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. And blogs.
As TGOTS mentioned in her post, we are both about to bail for a few days of, as the lovely Karen Carpenter so oddly put it, “Christmasing.”
I’m generally sort of cranky about Christmas in the weeks leading up to it; my family is big, there are a lot of presents to buy and wrap and mail, all that shopping doesn’t fit with my general anti-consumption mindset, and so forth. But once in a while I get a fleeting moment of genuine glee, an actual bit of pre-Christmas happiness wafting through my heart.
I got one of those moments last night. We were socked with snow this weekend, with a good 18 inches landing on our lives. Last night was trash night, so I had to shovel a route for the trash cans to travel down our long driveway (which we generally ignore in winter, parking at the end close to the road). So there I was, in the dark, alone, just my breath and the scrape of the shovel and the thwump of the snow — and I looked up, and my neighbors’ houses were twinkling and colorful, and the stars were out, and the night was crisp, and I just beamed. “Christmas!” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Then back to the shoveling.
I found more joy this morning, courtesy of the radio. Not Christmas music, but two happymaking songs: “Dancing Queen” — which will forever take me back to the living room of my dorm, junior year of college, and an incredible lip-synch performance by three of my dearest friends at our dorm talent show, an episode that deserves fuller description at some later point — and “Up Around the Bend.” The latter just makes me happy in the way that most CCR songs make me happy, and I drove along in the sun and the snow and it’s my last day of work before a nice few days off and — well. Christmas has its moments.
TGOTS and I will be back next week, unless she gets itchy while she’s with her family. My family has dial-up, so I’ll be blogging only in my mind.
When it comes to singin’ pop songs ’bout g-d, there are a few roads you can go by: the rockin’ road (see: Norman Greenbaum), the whimsical road (see: Joan Osborne), or the lovely road. See George Harrison.
Growing up, I was never all that aware of Harrison’s early solo music. Oh, I did hear “My Sweet Lord” plenty, on the radio, and did not like it. But I was more taken with his 1987 release Cloud Nine — the first cassette I bought with my own money! “Got My Mind Set On You” was an inescapable and deeeee-lightful FM hit in those days, and “When We Was Fab” struck me as a moving tribute to an era I was just beginning to appreciate. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you a single other song that was on that cassette, despite the fact that I loved it so well it bore a crack down the front, right across George’s mullet and mirrored sunglasses.
It wasn’t until I started dating my fella that I heard more of George’s early work — specifically, All Things Must Pass. This is just a beautiful recording, rambling from perky to pensive and back again, and some of the songs have become favorites of mine. There are love songs that I get all caught up in, to the point where I want to get married just so I can have one of those songs play at the wedding, and then I remember that they’re mostly love songs to g-d — or, more accurately, to Krishna.
Good times, the early ’70s, when you could score a pop hit with a song about your Hindu enlightenment-seeking. Not so good when you then got sued for unconsciously copying “He’s So Fine,” a hit from the previous decade. But now that I think about it, maybe George’s act was more conscious tribute than unconscious plagiarism. After all, the lyrics to the Chiffons hit could easily fit in one of his own goddish hits: “He’s so fine/Gotta be mine … We gotta get together/The sooner the better/I just can’t wait, I just can’t wait/To be held in his arms.”
[Holly Jolly Burl Ives Count: 5,692,088]
Summer of 1988. On the twisty mountain roads outside Rangeley, Maine. Squashed in the backseat of the family station wagon. Probably just pulled up the eyelids of my sleeping sister. (You know, for sport.) Walkman playing a cassette of songs taped off the radio. Deciding Pat Benatar’s “All Fired Up” — of all things — was like whoa, deep:
Now I believe there comes a time
When everything just falls in line
We live and learn from our mistakes
The deepest cuts are healed by faith.
WORD. I so copied those lyrics into my diary.
For a couple of summers when I was in junior high and high school, my family would rent a cabin in Rangeley — a lovely town in the mountains of western Maine. It is the kind of vacation that I would now find enchanting: all trees and lakes; days full of canoeing and swimming and sitting on porches reading books.
As a surly 13- or 14-year-old? I was rather less than enchanted. In fact, I was downright bratty about the whole enterprise. I KNOW YOU WILL BE SHOCKED.
OH you HORRIBLE parents, taking me away from my friends! How AWFUL of you to shut me up in the woods when there is a Boy of Interest at home! How RIDICULOUS for you to think that UNSPOILED NATURE and FAMILY TOGETHERNESS were important! Pfft.
Yes, it is true, I had a wretched adolescence, thanks to parents who wanted the best for me and my sisters, and worked hard to give us a week of fresh air and good clean fun. I will bear the scars of that horror forever.
Anyway, how strange it is that this one little song — not even one of the ones you’re apt to think of when you think (as I know you do) of the Benatar oeuvre — can conjure up such a specific stretch of road. It’s a song I have probably heard no more than two or three times since the late ‘80s, and yet when it came on the radio this morning my first thought was 1988 OUTSIDE RANGELEY WALKMAN WROTE LYRICS IN DIARY.
Pat, if you only knew.
PS It is apparently Riding in Cars with Sisters Day! Who knew?
Oh, Hall. Oh, Oates. What a magical duo you made. And still I’m not sure which is which, when pressed.
Two things about “Your Kiss Is On My List”: I always think the lyric is “your kiss is on my lips” — which is only logical, right? I sing it wrong, I just wrote it wrong and had to correct it, it is just forever wrong in my brain.
Second, these dapper gents for me are forever associated with one of my sisters, who was in her prime in the ’80s. The music thrilled her: Hall and Oates, Corey Hart, Bryan Adams. She wanted to be a singer, so she would often launch into their songs very earnestly. And I lost track of the number of times she played the beginning of “Heaven” on our piano. But at other times, we goofed along to the music — mostly on long car rides in the back of the Chevy Suburban. I have a mental snapshot of being at a gas station and singing “I Wear My Sunglasses at Night,” mugging our way through it and cracking each other up.
Lord, we had fun. And she was so ’80s! I was forever giving her these beautiful, beautiful pieces of jewelry, mostly huge plastic earrings in pink and aqua and violet hues the likes of which you rarely find today. She has of course moved on in her sartorial selections. But some part of my brain is still programmed to shop that way. Just a week or two ago, I saw a gigantic, gaudy bracelet and picked it up with her in mind. I had to say, out loud to Junior, “Oh wait, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and your auntie doesn’t dress like this.” I bought her something much more practical instead — but it’s still purple.
Oh it’s a momentous day. I have untangled a cobweb that’s lingered in the back of my brain for years and years and years.
To wit:
1. Eddie Money references “Ronnie” in “Take Me Home Tonight.” Ronnie Spector commences to sing, “Be my little baby …” Good times roll.
2. Jackson Browne and crew bust into “Stay” in “The Load-out,” and there’s the fab falsetto that I always thought was him but is apparently guitarist David Lindley. Whoever is singing, in my mind it is also a tribute to Ronnie.
3. Eddie Money and Jackson Browne and Ronnie and “Ronnie” never fail to summon each other’s songs for me,and also bring vague thoughts of Dirty Dancing to mind.
That is because — and this will surprise no one who has the proper regard for DD that I pretend to have — both “Stay” and “Be My Baby” are on the soundtrack. (“Stay,” of course, being performed not by Ronnie nor any other woman of that era, but by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.)
I feel so relieved to have figured this out. Incomprehensible post notwithstanding.
