Glorious sadness

Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
He took the midnight train goin anywhere

When I was in college, I had what I thought was a great idea for a short story. I think it was about an abused woman. My boyfriend at the time started yelling at me, "Why can't you write anything happy??" He didn't understand when I said that sadness was more compelling.

I've always been drawn to it. I have that luxury, I suppose, given that I have had a overwhelmingly normal, functional life filled with much happiness. There's a hyperreality to sadness, an idea of, "this is it; this is what it means to really feel."

That must explain why I am obsessed with 80s music. It's desperate and sad, melodies that plaster themselves across a heart and chest that is barely keeping it together. One note away from falling apart. Listening to it summons the feelings, the physicality of it in an instant.

When I was in junior high, I got invited to a slumber party at D's house. I don't know why. Perhaps her mother suggested it. We certainly weren't friends. She was sweet and kind, and popular for those reasons, but she also continually sported a leather jacket from her much older boyfriend (she started dating high school boys when we was in the 5th grade, yet as far as I knew, never suffered any vicious talk behind her back about it). To note that these jackets, the succession of them, were probably Members-Only jackets really puts a damper on how thoroughly bad ass they seemed. For she didn't date the cross country team, the basketball team; she dated the guys who took welding for the express purpose of pouring their creative energies into making water pipes and got caught smoking behind the gym instead of participating in P.E. class. Guys she somehow tamed into watching their language and politely extinguishing their butts when she came around.

This was the girl who invited me to a slumber party. This was the girl about whose parties I'd heard whispered rumors. To say I was rattled and mystified at my invitation is an understatement. I wondered if it was a joke or if she had somehow lost a bet and I was the butt of it.

It was unlike any sleepover I'd ever been to. We got to order pizza, and drink Mountain Dew in her room, making prank calls on her private phone line. Her bedroom walls were plastered with posters of Warrant, Stryker, and Motley Crue. We watched videos on MTV (a channel I had only heard about). D talked knowledgeably about the themes in her favorite song, "Janie's Got a Gun," using words I had never even heard before, and she sighed over Nikki Sixx and Janie Lane.

Then her boyfriend drove past. He and his friends picked us up, and we cruised Main for a while. It was something I knew older kids to do; never imagined I would do it, too. The high school boys blared their hair metal and tolerated us waving our arms out of the windows in the air stream and shrieking.

It was almost too much for my system. Wired on caffeine and newness, the whole evening had a dreamlike quality. It became imperative to cross my arms in front of my chest, holding myself together in an attempt to keep my chest from breaking open and merging with the night. I didn't know how to stop it, how to put on the brakes and regain control out of the heady dizziness that the night became. I didn't want to. I didn't want it to ever end. It was wildly beautiful, desperate, and sad. I couldn't have articulated it then, but I sensed something beyond my experience, beyond my maturity, about the gorgeous tragedy of boys looking for excitement in a dead-end small town, of beautiful, ripening girls, children really, anxiously expanding the boundaries of experience.

Shaggy-haired boys

Today I set up community service hours for a boy who--if I were still a 15-year-old girl--I would have been all over. He would totally have been my boyfriend. I would have sighed with happiness over his shaggy hair and band tee-shirt. That's the adult me talking, though. In reality, who I was at 15 probably would not have been able to handle a little juvenile delinquent, no matter how adorable—multiple arrests and a drinking problem in the boy I mooned over.

I like working with adolescents because I remember so vividly what it was like to be a teenager. There was a lot about that time period that sucked. Just plain sucked. I was painfully shy, didn't know to talk to boys; I was so sheltered and naive that I missed a lot of experiences that could have been really valuable. Being naive also caused me to be extremely judgmental about things that, in the end, weren't such a big deal. As time goes on, those fall away and I remember more the wonderful times that I had with an amazing group of friends. Everything is new and important and life changing when you are in adolescence.

I still remember what it was like to hear Eddie Vedder's voice for the first time when I was 16. My tastes have changed in some ways--no longer do I own an Amy Grant CD (purchased at a church retreat when I was 14 or 15)--but my heart still breaks with longing when I hear him sing. That has never changed. Listening to a live album I picked up a few years ago at a used record store, I remember being a senior in high school and learning Pearl Jam was coming to Wichita. It was the first time I knew a band enough to follow them--and I was smitten enough to take the enormous step (for me) of trying to get tickets. I even talked with a few guys in my class, boys to whom I'd otherwise have nothing to say, and arranged a ride with them if I scored a ticket. The logistics of that--how I'd be in a car for an hour each way with two hot guys I only nominally knew--didn't even concern me; such was my love for Eddie Vedder.

This is the way that story should end: I scored a ticket, had a moshingly-good time at the concert, swooned and screamed over Eddie Vedder, and in the dark car ride home, found myself a grungy hot new boyfriend.

This is how the story actually ends: I was on the phone all night calling Ticketmaster, listening to a busy signal the whole time. It wasn't until I was 22 that I saw Eddie Vedder for the first time, but since I also walked past him in the crowd after his performance, it somewhat makes up for missing the show at 17. And at 17, simply trying to get a ticket was a big enough step.

So I set up community service for this kid, and it's a good thing I'm not also his therapist.
Deep down, a part of me will always have such a weakness for boys like him, and Eddie Vedder.

Getting to know you

When I was a freshman in college, I was hanging out a lot with a guy named Tony who got a new roommate halfway through the first semester, Gene. Tony spent a lot of time away from the room, because he didn't know the guy--thought he was weird. One night I went over there when both of them were home, and instead of going out, I had both of them settle in, and I gave Gene the third degree. For the next few hours, he talked about himself and answered every question I could think to ask. (It was fairly easy; I quickly discovered Gene really liked to talk about himself.) By the end of the evening, Tony knew Gene inside and out, and Gene was my new best friend.

College was conducive to getting to know people. Everyone seemed eager to throw everything they were at everyone they met, "this is me, this is me!". I remember hours and hours of bad poetry (most of it mine), shared in cramped dorm rooms. For a long time, that's how I began relationships (what did I know? Then I was a novice.)--by reading all my tortured poetry, and listening to theirs. Once an entire (albeit shortlived) relationship revolved around sharing Jim Morrison lyrics.

I felt I'd miss out on friendship and relationship opportunities if I didn't spill everything. Or that there couldn't be any secrets; someone couldn't really get to know me unless they knew everything.

The older I get, the less comfortable I am with that. Who I really am is a protective layer, and I feel too exposed to share it all too soon. Thus, I am somewhat taken aback by people who share (what I think is) too much, who become friends too quickly. Sometimes I find people with whom I am immediately comfortable. I talk and talk, and while I should take that as a sign that I've met a compatible soul, later, I'm still a little embarrassed, to realize how much I've revealed.

I'm drawn to the quieter, more reticent people. (It's a trap I fell into all too easily when dating, believing it was the shy boys who held the real mystery. My friend Bob said, "maybe they're just boring," but I always believed I was the one to whom they'd open up.) It does seem more exciting, finding things out slowly, and infinitely more satisfying. It's getting to gradually form an entire picture bit by bit in your mind yourself, rather than being presented at once with the entire thing.

But sometimes it makes for surprises. I have a friend from school whom I adore. It's taken a while to get to know her, but now we are fairly close. The only thing about her that I can't reconcile is that she hates cats and dogs. The idea I have in my head of her, the one that's been constructed by slowly getting to know her (and other friends agree) is that she most definitely would be a cat lover. It baffles me that my assessment was wrong. But I suppose that's the interesting part of it, too, reconfiguring who I believe she is.

Explosions

I am obsessed with explosions. In a bad way.

I'm scared of firecrackers.

I hold glasses gingerly because I'm waiting for them to shatter between my fingers, cutting a bloody path across my palm. I've had glass explode on me before. That it was directly related to being on a hot stove, and knowing the heat instantly fuses the edges of the break doesn't occur to me in my paranoia of all glass, all the time.

When I boil water in the kettle and it whistles shrillly, I carefully pull it off the burner and flip open the top, then wait a minute because I expect the metal kettle to burst open, spilling boiling water on me.

Pushing the gas pedal down past where the car comfortably wants to go revs the engine and makes my heart stop for a second, waiting for the front hood of my car to erupt in sparks and flames.

I expect it. I believe it will happen one day.

Once in the throes of a panic attack, the only one I've ever had, back in college, I heard a ticking coming from the water heater closet. I laid down on the floor next to it, waiting for it to burst. I fell asleep there.

When I was a kid, a stove really did explode on me. We were making cookies with a babysitter, and she didn't know how to light our old, scary propane stove. I was ten or so, and instructed her to stick the match down into the pilot hole while turning on the gas. A flute of blue flame rose out of the hole. That had never happened before. We didn't know what to do. So I blew it out. And then the kitchen exploded.

I remember blue and orange light. It fizzled and filled the entire room, and was over in a fraction of a second. But windows were knocked out of their frames across the house, and a quarter inch of my hair, brows, and lashes were sizzled.

Swim team

I practice tennis at the Y. The courts are next to an indoor pool. It's been so temperate lately that they leave the floor to ceiling windows open, and swim season just started. As I walked across the court each time after my turn in the hot seat, I'd see bodies lined up against the window. Adolescent boys, their new muscles pop out of their skin like novelty balloons, and the girls they talk to seem light years older than them. Light years older than I remember being at that age.

At that age, I was nearing my inglorious end to swim team. Not so much a loser as filler. I was just another body to put in an empty heat. I always worked just hard enough to get through it. (I never really understood the passion that drives athletes to put every ounce of themselves into competition.) It was, as sports have always been for me, a social outlet for the very shy.

No matter what happened during the school year or who I was then, during the summer, I had friends on the team. There was no one from my class to take the lead and ignore me like usual. My teammates were older or younger, and I was a part of the group.

During meets, we'd write our events on our arms in permanent marker, and draw hearts in zinc oxide on our backs, to tan in our own summer tattoos. Each poolhouse candy counter was reassuredly the same; we'd get Zotz and Chik-o-Stik and a particular kind of red liquorice I've never been able to find anywhere else, and we'd split up our spoils.

That's where I learned how to flirt, with two guys a year ahead of me, who would never have looked at me twice--and didn't--any other time of the year. And with inappropriately friendly college boys who were terrible coaches for teenage girls. Years later, I still have a crush on one of the former guys that I have never been able to shake.

Then one summer, I got a part-time job, and my parents never mentioned swim team again. As an inherently (where did I get this??) lazy person, no matter how much I enjoy a sport or exercise, I won't do it unless pushed into it. So I forgot about sun and swimming and boys in bathing suits, and started pushing cones at an ice cream shop in town.

The kids in the window reminded me, though, of what a good way to pass the summer.

Railroads

The smell of tar in the air takes me home, pulls me down the railroad tracks into the distance, into the past.

It's country to me. Summer. When heat softens the tar on the tracks and fills the air.

I remember walking the rails to Hannah's house. Putting pennies on the track to flatten when the train passed over. Waiting out a passing train in the creek underneath the tracks, the reverberations pounding in my ears.

The smell conjures music, battered guitars playing folk ballads and old harmonicas wailing out plaintive train whistles.

It reminds me of the loneliness of hobos walking the line, tagging the underbellies of cars and hopping aboard to traverse the country.

I was near the railroad last week, in an old, restored train station by the river. The view shimmered in the heat.

Twelve hundred miles away, and I'm still thinking of Kansas.

Ten

One of the first hot days of spring, and it makes me think of putting on this Pearl Jam album. I don't listen it that frequently nowadays, but there was a time when it was on permanent rotation in my CD player. Initially that was because it was only the second CD I had ever purchased, after I got my CD player for my sixteenth birthday.

And then, of course, I became obsessed. I never connected with music before quite as much as I did with that album. I've said before that I'm not much for song lyrics, so it wasn't the words that pulled me in (even now I had to look up some of the lyrics to see specifically why I didn't identify with them. They're not even tattooed on my brain after nearly 15 years). It wasn't really their specific angst that drew me, but that they had angst.

By senior year, I grabbed hold of the grunge look like I'd been waiting my whole life for it. Hung up my first pinup poster ever, and it was Eddie. And when I heard Pearl Jam had a tour date in Wichita, I had TicketMaster on speed dial, having already arranged with one of the guys in my class--someone I might not have had the nerve to speak to outside of class were it not for our mutual appreciation of the band--to ride with him if I got lucky enough to find a ticket.

I didn't. Which was probably not a bad thing, considering I was a naive 17-year-old and had no idea what could be in store for me, roadtripping with a bunch of guys to see a raucous band with a roving mosh pit.

But it gave me the idea that next time, I really could do it if I wanted.

Music at home

Last night Fran invited me to an event one of her classmates was putting on. She didn't know many details, so I didn't know what to expect. It was a musical review (revue?) that had been picked up by Broadway recently, a play written by a local singer-songwriter based on Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies.

We walked into her classmate Joe's tall, Colonial home, into a big living room stripped bare of furniture, filled with people watching a man on bass and a woman on guitar, singing. They did a few songs, then other people picked up instruments and moved into what I think was the dining room, filled with amps and microphones. A tiny boy dressed in a flaming cowboy shirt, snakeskin boots, and a black ten-gallon that fell to his nose swaggered out, carrying a guitar that covered most of his body. He was 7, and a Hank Williams impersonator. It was really the most precious thing I've ever seen. His singing was, well, you know, he's seven. But I was blown away by how his teeny fingers hopped from chord to chord with ease--he didn't even have to look! (Sometimes I have to look.)

The crowd was mostly grandparents and middle-aged folks when we arrived, but as the night went on, a younger crowd started showing up, and it was clear by the time we left that an afterparty was brewing in the backyard. Joe's friends seemed like the type I would enjoy. He seemed to be about my age, very personable and good looking, goateed, with a poplin fedora, thick silver ring on his pinky, and trendy pointy black shoes like I'm always trying to interest Tim in.

Fran and I mostly stuck to watching the music, and talking to Joe whenever his rounds would place him in our vicinity. He introduced us to his friends once, and they seemed really cool, but we weren't feeling that social. It was fun for me just to get to hang out with her. The music was easy to sit back and listen to. I haven't been able to hang out and listen to live country or folk in a long time.

Towards the end of the evening, Joe played a few songs. One of them, "Valentine," stuck in my head like a burr in cotton. I knew it front to back, but couldn't remember from where. I asked, and he said, "Old 97s." Of course. I started talking about music, and as soon as the words "alt-country" left my mouth, I could feel the light go on inside me, and I knew if things were different, in my old life, that would have been the moment when the evening changed, and lengthened, the water in my hand would have become a beer, then another, and the crowd would thin, then disappear, and eventually, I'd tiptoe out the next morning in the bright sunlight with a phone number in the back pocket of my jeans.

Musicans get me every time.

In a much more wholesome way, the night reminded me of being a kid and going to the Music Emporium for concerts. It was a dusty music store that would open its storage space in the back on weekends for shows. It started out small, a potluck dinner, people sitting on boxes or bringing their own lawn chairs. The kids would run around in the front where the instruments were, and try to count all the frog trinkets and figurines (plus the lazy cat named Frog who slept in plush guitar cases) that the owners collected. I once spent a concert sketching the guitar player bent over playing. I remember the folds of his workshirt and the smooth, reckless curve of the instrument were my favorite parts to draw. My parents pushed me up afterwards to present him with the picture. I was probably eight or ten.

The evening made me think of how I want my home to be someday, filled with laughing people with a beer in one hand and an instrument in the other. I want to host evenings like this, in our spacious home somewhere--preferrably in the middle of the country with a wide porch and a living room big enough for dancing. I want to draw creative people to me with temptations of my cooking, and Tim's love of playing music.

It was a really wonderful evening.