Tag: memories

life

Background Music V

Sue

Love and Loss in the 90s

“I’ve got a good mother. And her voice is what keeps me here. Feet on ground, heart in hand. Facing forward, be yourself.” ~ Jann Arden, Good Mother

This is a story about sudden loss and grief. Please bookmark and come back another time if you happen to be feeling a little fragile today. It’s been an emotional piece for me to write and at first I shied away from doing so. Only in my personal journals have I written about the death of my mother. It would be remiss of me not to include this chapter of my life because it so profoundly shaped the person I am today, and I know she’d be happy that I’m telling stories again.

By the early nineties we’d outgrown our first two-bedroom home, so my husband and I sold it and bought a newer house in the suburbs that was more suitable for a family of four and a dog. I loved that house and it still owns my heart, even though we sold it years ago to buy the acreage we currently live on. When moving day arrived I walked through the house alone one last time to say a tearful goodbye to the empty rooms. I still dream about it sometimes. In those dreams one or both of my parents are often there too.

If those walls could talk they’d say that the background music was Disney movie soundtracks in the beginning with boy/girl pop bands following close behind. My own nineties mixtape featured REM, U2, Celine Dion, Blue Rodeo, Pearl Jam, Jann Arden and Dwight Yoakam. Yes, always and forever an eclectic mix for me. Just recently my daughter said that because of me hearing Celine sing reminds her of housecleaning. For more tedious tasks like oven cleaning, I’ve tended to lean a little more heavily on Aerosmith to keep me dreaming on.

That second house holds some of the best memories of my life. It was there that we watched our two children grow from toddlers to teenagers. It was the place our families and friends gathered for frequent visits and big holiday parties. In the backyard was a large dogwood tree that was truly exquisite when it bloomed during warmer months. The first time my mother saw that tree in bloom she told me it was her favourite because in the language of flowers dogwoods represent strength. I researched that recently and it’s true. Quote “the gentle, whimsical dogwood blooms may look delicate, but they’re connected to durability and the ability to withstand various challenges in life.” I’m not sure who decides these things about flowers, but it seemed important to my mom so I’ve hung onto the memory since then.

When our kids were in their beginning years of school, my retired parents lived about an eight hour drive away in a small town where one of my sisters lived with her grown family. A couple of times a year Mom would hop on a Greyhound bus headed for the coast to come stay with me and my young family for awhile. She’d insist on cooking and cleaning and baking for us, no matter how many times I told her to just relax and enjoy the visit. “Got to earn my keep,” she’d joke. Mom was a caretaker and caring for family was her greatest joy. Meddling in the lives of her six children was by far her favourite pastime. It was irritating at times, but in large families at least one head of state needed to reign in the chaos with steely control. Mom was barely 5’4″, and much like her own mother had been, she was a tiny force of nature when it came to the well-being of her kids and by extension her grandkids.

Despite my nineties playlist, the radio in my car was always tuned to a station that still played eighties hits. My comfort music, I guess. A brief moment when the weight of adult responsibilities could be packed inside the trunk for a little drive time with Billy Joel. One summer day I drove my mom and kids somewhere, probably to and from the mall. I’m still not much of a shopper, but if you gave my mom a buggy to lean on she was off bargain hunting for hours like it was her job. My siblings and I used to practically draw straws to decide who had to take Mom to the mall because she didn’t drive. I guess I’d pulled the shortest one that day. My sweet little ones were happily distracted in the backseat with new toys their grandma had just bought for them. We were all tired and headed home when Mom said to me from the passenger seat something along the lines of this, “When I die promise me you’ll play “Wind Beneath My Wings” at my funeral. It has to be Bette Midler singing and not some knock-off version like the one I heard at a funeral recently. It just wasn’t the same at all.”

I was gobsmacked. Death was a subject we normally swerved to avoid. The loss of her second eldest child at only nineteen had, quite frankly, nearly destroyed our mother. Funerals were a hard fact of life that had to be faced, honoured, and then no longer discussed. The fact that she was suddenly preplanning the music for hers surprised me so much that I didn’t know what to say except to tell her I’d do my best, but she was probably going to outlive us all anyway. She replied that she wasn’t, of course, and that she was okay with it because she wouldn’t want to outlive any of us, ever again. What she wasn’t okay with was anyone but Bette singing at her funeral. I dug a little deeper to figure out if maybe this was her strange way of telling me she was dying. I think I got some melodramatic response about how people her age were all living on borrowed time. She was only in her late sixties, and I thought she was being ridiculous, so I let the matter drop, kept it to myself, and filed it in the back of my mind under “awkward things I wish I hadn’t heard Mom say”. Don’t we all have a thick folder like that?

Just a few years later, her death happened suddenly one rainy autumn Friday. That day started normally. I’d returned home from dropping the kids at school and was rushing around the house, cleaning up breakfast dishes while also getting ready to leave for a dental appointment. The phone rang just as I was heading to my car in the garage. I let the machine answer the call until I heard my mother’s voice pleading for me to pick up. I sensed by her tone that something was very wrong, so I took the call and she told me she was about to have a procedure done at the hospital. She said she had a bad feeling about it and didn’t want to do it. It was a test she’d had done many times before due to a longtime battle with Celiac Disease. She sounded a little panicked about it, so I asked her to put my sister who’d driven her to the hospital on the phone.

My sister explained that it needed to be done because Mom’s symptoms were worsening and there could be some internal bleeding in her stomach. She was going to be given anesthesia and yes, of course the medical team knew about her pacemaker. Not for the first time, I felt the frustration of my parents choosing to live so far away and how very little control or input I had because of it. I made my sister promise to call me the minute our mom was in the recovery room. Mom came back to the phone sounding tired and maybe a little resigned? I’m not sure if that’s the right word. All I know is that I told her not to worry and reassured her everything was going to be fine. The last thing she said to me was I love you, Susan.

Much later that day, I received a call to tell me that my mom had gone into cardiac arrest during the procedure and when nothing could be done to save her, my dad had collapsed and was now admitted to the hospital himself to undergo tests on his heart. His shattered heart, I was certain, because I knew exactly how that felt. It was too much to comprehend. I refused to believe it, at first. Then slowly I sank to my knees, still gripping the phone, as understanding began to dawn. I curled myself into the fetal position on the floor and somehow contained the urge to scream because of my children in the next room. From then on the only thing I heard was me telling myself I should’ve stopped it from happening. Mom knew it was a bad idea and nobody had listened. It wasn’t unusual for her to get strong feelings ahead of something happening, good or bad feelings that were always very real to her. Most people called her superstitious. I think she was more intuitive than most people.

Guilt. It can eat you alive, if you let it. I kept myself too busy to let it. In the horrible days that followed, I told myself I could get through every single thing that needed to be done because my mom had withstood the unimaginable loss of a son. She’d once told me that after his funeral well-meaning people kept reminding her she still had other children to live for, as if us six combined could ever fill the shoes of one. For a long time she lived in fear that one of us could just as easily be taken from her. It never occurred to me that the same could happen to her.

The first days were the hardest, of course. Nothing can prepare you for the reality of death. It quite literally took my legs out from under me and I couldn’t call the one person I knew who was capable of setting me right again, the way she’d done my entire life. The morning after Mom died, I left with two of my brothers and one sister for the eight hour drive to reach our parents’ place. I don’t think any of us had slept the night before. I know I hadn’t. I kept reliving every call I’d made to change someone else’s life that day. The denial. The questions. The silence. The sobs. I was bruised by everyone’s pain. Sometime during that long night I’d made up my mind to leave the kids at home with my husband. I hated leaving them, but I knew I couldn’t bring them with me. It was the first time since they were born that I felt incapable of taking care of them and myself at the same time. More guilt.

We drove all that way because we knew we’d need an extra vehicle once we got there and we didn’t know for how long that was going to be. None of us wanted to travel alone. It was the only time I ever remember being in a car with my siblings and not debating which music we should listen to. Once in my teen years while on a similar road trip with my eldest brother to go visit the same sister, he got so fed up with The Cars cassette I kept replaying that he actually yanked it out of the tape deck and tossed it over his shoulder. Oh, the irony of “Good Times Roll” rolling around the backseat. He soon got fed up with my silent treatment too. At the next town he stopped at one of those General Stores you sometimes find in the middle of nowhere, and then came out with a package of strawberry Twizzlers and a Boston cassette as a kind of peace offering. Even now when I hear “More Than A Feeling” I remember how mad I was at him, and how quickly I got over it to crank up the volume on my new favourite song. On this road trip, however, we travelled mostly in silence, lost in our anguished thoughts and then trying not to think at all. My brothers took turns driving. My sister sat with me in the backseat and I think we huddled together most of the way there. We were all in shock. How could she be here one day and gone the next? We asked that question of each other over and over because there was never an answer that made sense.

My eldest sister who lived by my parents kept us updated about Dad’s condition at every phone stop we made to her along the way. By the time we got there, Dad was out of the hospital and recovering at home, but was clearly in no shape to help us with any of the arrangements for Mom. Another brother had a very long trip ahead of him to reach us, as did some of my mom’s siblings, so we put off the funeral until later the following week. Mom died on the Friday before the Thanksgiving long weekend and it was almost impossible to get anything done because of the holiday. Caring for my dad became my number one priority. I spent most of the time sitting on the edge of his bed while he tried to rest, holding his hand as he stared at the far wall in silence. He was completely broken. I kept worrying that his heart would suddenly stop and we’d lose him too. Sometimes I wanted to tell him in frustration to get up and be the parent we all needed, and then I’d immediately feel guilty about it. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. I didn’t know that then. I just kept trying to put a tight lid on mine to stop it from pouring out. Five years later, on the day before my fortieth birthday, I held his hand in much the same way when he left this world too.

At one point I broke out in an itchy stress rash that covered my face and neck. It got so bad I had to go to the ER about it. Unfortunately, being a small town, the doctor on duty was also my mom’s physician, who wanted to prescribe a sedative for my nerves and advised me to get some rest. I completely lost my mind in that moment. I began yelling at her that I wanted ointment not drugs to numb what I was feeling because didn’t she understand that this kind of pain had to be felt right now, not weeks from now? When I got to the part about it being her fault my mother was dead, both my sisters stepped behind the exam room curtain and tearfully ushered me out of the hospital. I ran away from them in the parking lot and walked up and down the streets of the town until it got dark and I finally ran out of fight. That, of course, was the anger part of grief rearing its thorny head. It was terrible. I felt terrible for saying what I did. But at least I felt alive again.

When I returned on foot to Dad’s place, I avoided everyone and went straight to a guest bedroom to drop down exhausted onto the bed. My sisters soon came in to check on me. Without a word, they each stretched out on either side of me and hugged me between them, like they used to when they were teenagers and I was a child and we shared a bedroom. For some reason one of them began to hum “Summer Nights” from the movie Grease, and then the other one began to sing along. Before long, they were both singing John Travolta’s part in the song and so I naturally became Olivia Newton-John. A brother came barging in to tell us to stop it because we were being disrespectful and one sister flipped him the bird. It was the first time I’d laughed in days. How many times had our mom done just that, poked her head in to tell us to cut it out and go to sleep? Sometimes she would join in on the chorus of a song she liked before telling us lights out. We knew without a doubt that Mom would’ve approved of us singing that silly song, loud and strong, because we were doing it to comfort each other.

I was thirty-five years old and for the first time ever I felt like the entire weight of the family was sitting squarely on my shoulders. I was the youngest, and yet I was making most of the hardest decisions. In the days that followed, while people around me seemed to retreat further into grief, I struggled to organize a funeral I still couldn’t believe was happening. I remember sitting between a couple of my siblings in the back offices of the funeral home. If you’ve ever done that then you know the difficult questions that are asked. All I knew was that Mom wanted Bette Midler to sing. I also chose the very old Jimmy Durante version of “In the Garden” because she used to get a kick out of the whimsical way he sang the hymn. The music part came easy.

I figured she’d want to be cremated to have her ashes laid to rest in our brother’s gravesite. Did she ever tell me that was what she wanted? I don’t know, but my heart knew it was the right thing to do. She’d lived without him for so long that it was only right they be together now. In the large showroom where all the coffins and urns were on display, I spotted a small square box to hold her ashes in with dogwood flowers etched into the solid wood. Another sign, I thought, and a reminder that I had it in me to withstand this challenge because I’d learned by her example how to be strong, when it mattered the most.

This is my truth. Some might disagree, but I know most of the decisions were made by me in that funeral home, while others paced and wrung their hands, wondering how I could be so calm about it. I wasn’t calm. I was silently falling apart piece by piece and nobody seemed to be noticing. Before we left with a list of things to do, I went looking for a restroom and a minute to collect myself. It was then that I heard soft music coming from behind the closed door of one of the admin offices. On the radio was Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s a Heartache”, another song my mom used to play on repeat. While leaning against the doorframe to listen, I realized she was still speaking to me and I was hearing her.

I know it sounds strange to say that it was my mother who got me through the first days following her death. Clearly she was not there. I know she wasn’t because I found myself looking for her everywhere. The woman ahead of me in line at the grocery store, who had the same hairstyle as her. The woman crossing the street with a similar coat and walk. It’s normal after a loved one passes suddenly to imagine seeing them in random places. I think unless you see something so profound happen before your eyes, it can’t possibly be real. Or maybe not having them in this world all of a sudden is just too much to process at once. We learn from an early age that imagination is not reality. We learn reality means facing facts. The fact of the matter was, my best friend wasn’t coming back and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Her voice hadn’t left me, though. I had only to listen very closely to hear it.

My husband showed up earlier than expected before the day of the funeral. He’d made the difficult decision to leave our kids in the care of his parents and come sooner, even though it almost cost him his job. I remember throwing myself into his arms when he appeared out of the blue because he’s always given me the best, most bracing hugs. He helped me to gather my things and then checked us into a nearby hotel, away from everyone. I was not the family’s new head of state. I was in as much pain as everyone else. I needed time and the space to be sad for myself. All of this he figured out just by looking at me.

He’d brought with him ointment for my rash, prescribed by our family doctor back home, and we sat together in that locked hotel room for an entire day and night. He gave me food and tissues and hugs, while I talked and cried and then slept for hours at a time. That’s love, my friends. We all need someone who won’t hesitate to ruffle feathers to pluck us out of the chaos during the worst moments of our lives.

Honestly, I barely remember the funeral. I do remember Bette singing and feeling glad about it. I sat between my husband and my dad, holding on tight to both of their hands because ready or not it was officially time to say our final goodbyes. The brother who had the longest journey to get there was the one who officiated the entire service. Somehow he found the strength to do it and to do it so remarkably well. I asked him once how he’d gotten through it and he gave me one word Faith. He’d asked each of us to write down favourite memories for him to read aloud because none of us felt strong enough to speak. We were surprised, and yet not surprised, to discover one particular childhood memory was shared by all of us. On stormy nights our mother would often call us outside onto the covered back porch, where we’d sit with her wrapped in bathrobes or blankets she’d crocheted, sleepy and safe, while rain drummed a melody of love on the aluminum roof above our heads.

In 1995, not long before my mother died, a longtime favourite rock band of mine, Pearl Jam, released an EP called Merkin Ball that was a companion to Neil Young’s album Mirror Ball. On it is a song Eddie Vedder wrote following the death of a beloved mentor. For over twenty years “Long Road” has been the song I listen to on the days I miss my mom the most or when I feel like she’s missing something important in my life. It’s heartfelt and melancholy, and also optimistic.

Below is the Youtube link to a best-loved classic performance of Long Road (at a later 9/11 tribute, I believe) featuring Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, along with Neil Young sublimely playing the organ like he’s the Phantom of the Opera. Eddie’s soft hitch of breath at the end of the song speaks volumes.

Long Road “I have wished for so long. How I wish for you today.”

Thank you for taking the time to read this and any of my previous Background Music stories. I have one more music-related story that will be coming soon. It talks about the spark of inspiration that first prompted me to write this blog series after I began researching a novel I’m writing.

Below are the Youtube links to the music and artists in the order mentioned or thought about during the writing of this blog post. If you only have time for a couple, then make them Long Road and Good Mother because they most clearly reflect my feelings about my mom. Best listened to with headphones on to hear the words.

Good Mother – Jann Arden Every word of this song feels written for me.

Everybody Hurts – REM “Hold on.”

With or Without You – U2

Where Does My Heart Beat Now – Celine Dion

Bad Timing – Blue Rodeo Still my favourite Canadian band.

The Heart That You Own – Dwight Yoakam Such a memorable live performer. My husband and I went with friends to see him in 1993 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. We had floor seats, but everyone stayed on their feet all night, dancing like we were in a honky tonk.

Dream On – Aerosmith For sure in my all-time top ten. I always need to hear it loud.

Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel) – Billy Joel My big brother took teenage me to see Billy Joel’s concert in Vancouver in 1978 in place of his girlfriend. I can’t remember if it was because they’d just broken up. Regardless, her loss was my gain because I’ve never forgotten that special night with the Piano Man.

Wind Beneath My Wings – Bette Midler Only the real deal for you Mom xo

Good Times Roll – The Cars

More Than A Feeling – Boston

Summer Nights – John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

In The Garden – Jimmy Durante’s funny little version of the classic hymn.

It’s a Heartache – Bonnie Tyler

life

Background Music IV

Sue

You Make Loving Fun: a mid-80s meet-cute

I never did believe in miracles
But I’ve a feeling it’s time to try ~ Fleetwood Mac

How often have we all heard that good things happen when we least expect them? Nobody mentions what can happen when we make a last minute decision to take a left turn instead of a right.

I’d already made up my mind by twenty-three that I was happiest when I wasn’t dating anyone. I decided I was done with the complications. No more trying to read the wrong guy’s mind or worrying about his hurt feelings. By then I’d grown accustomed to life on my own. Besides, it no longer felt awkward eating alone at restaurants with only my thoughts or a book for company. Sometimes I even preferred it that way. In my mind that was progress.

My older siblings cracked jokes about me already being jaded about love. An optimistic married friend stuck a magnet to my fridge of a cartoon frog wearing a crown with the caption you gotta kiss a lot of toads to find your prince. A single friend slipped under that magnet a “Purple Rain” photo of Prince on his motorcycle, just to be funny. Another friend taped a magazine photo of Charles and Diana to the fridge with a black felt pen X over Charles and Prince Toad!! scribbled under him. It was the middle of the eighties. By then even Bryan Adams had read between the lines of what was really going on with Chuck and Di in his heartfelt plea to “Diana”. I left all of those funny things on the fridge to remember I had people in my life who knew how to make me laugh at myself. It really is the greatest gift.

I was still working at the hideous secretarial job I talked about in my previous Background Music post, but circumstances had gotten marginally better because I’d earned a good promotion. Eventually someone else my age was hired to take my old job and the office manager’s verbal abuse that seemed to go along with it. I felt sorry for the new girl, so I got more emotionally involved in her workday problems then I probably should have. I didn’t really like her much. She tended to find the tiniest fault in anything good. In other words, she was a downer. I didn’t know her outside of work and that was fine by me because I already had a great group of friends. For the rest of this story we’ll call that long ago co-worker Sheila–not her real name but close enough.

One Friday evening, Sheila called me at home to ask me if I’d go out to dinner with her because she’d had a terrible day and could use a friend. I declined at first because I didn’t want to get involved in more office politics, especially outside of work and at the start of a weekend. But she tempted me with fish and chips at my favourite hole in the wall spot at the beach that she’d probably heard me mention once in the lunch room. She even offered to drive us there. It was her treat, she insisted, and it sounded so much better than anything I’d intended to reheat for dinner or watch alone on TV. We took a long walk on the beach afterwards because it was an unusually warm evening for so early in Spring. She talked non-stop about work problems and I kept walking ahead of her on the sand, looking to escape the drama. This was the moment I took that sharp left turn, against my better judgement. I blame it on the music.

We later walked up from the beach and found ourselves outside of a beachside neighbourhood pub that was blasting really good rock hits through the open doors of a patio onto the sidewalk in front. It wasn’t a nightclub and it looked a little rough around the edges. I hesitated when Sheila suggested we go in to get a drink and listen to the music for awhile. I didn’t have to work the next morning, but I knew she did, which meant that since she was driving we wouldn’t be staying long. So I finally agreed to just one drink. It didn’t look like the kind of place that had a dress code, which was a good thing because I was, to the best of my knowledge, wearing my favourite casual clothes that I always wore back then: old faded Levi’s and flat-soled, pointy-toed faux suede ankle boots that were called Peter Pan Getaway Boots. I wore those comfortable boots well past their fashion expiry date until one day they just fell apart.

“No dancing,” I warned Sheila. Not even if INXS came on. I adored Michael Hutchence then and “What You Need”, so that was going to be hard for me to resist. “And no flirting with guys,” I said to her and to myself, no matter how good-looking. One drink and then home. Deal? Deal. That was our agreement on the sidewalk before going inside. I should’ve known when Sheila paused to comb her wind-blown hair and put on cherry lipgloss that she fully intended to break the deal.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t busy for a Friday night. We easily found a table squeezed between a row of pool tables and the small, mostly empty dance floor. We ordered our drinks and put in a couple of requests with the DJ. I don’t think we’d even received our drink order before a guy with a pool cue made a beeline our way. Sheila immediately recognized him from back in her high school days and told me with a dramatic roll of her eyes not to invite him to sit down because he used to have a crush on her and she couldn’t stand him. Before I could tell her not to worry about it, he’d already pulled out a chair and sat down with us. My first impression was that he couldn’t read social cues because Sheila acted so cold towards him she nearly refroze the ice cubes in our drinks when they finally showed up.

They reminisced a little about school while I sipped my Screwdriver and thought about how this guy was a study in contradictions. He was wearing a stylish blue polo shirt that perfectly matched his bright blue eyes, and black slacks that looked like they’d been ironed professionally with sharp creases front and centre down the legs. I found out later that he couldn’t have cared less about clothes, so he’d walk into Bootlegger and ask any salesclerk on hand to make wardrobe decisions for him. He was a year older than me and an only child who still lived at home. His mom ironed his clothes. Red flags? I thought so, at first.

He also had the whitest teeth I’d seen outside of a toothpaste ad. He kept sliding that dazzling smile from Sheila to me. Back and forth it went. I couldn’t decide if he was cocky or confident. Both, maybe? The rest of his face was buried in hair. He resembled a younger, dark-haired version of Grizzly Adams. (A seventies TV character. Photo reference here.) His hair was too long and shaggy and he had a very thick, untrimmed beard. I really disliked scruffy beards, and still do. I’ve mentioned before that I tended to prefer messy guys over the more preppy ones, but this one looked like he’d been lost in the mountains for weeks and had stolen somebody else’s clothes on his way out of the woods.

Eventually he wandered back to take his next shot at the pool table behind us. The second he was out of earshot Sheila hissed at me not to make him so warmly welcome if he came back. I reminded her that I hadn’t spoken one word to him and the wildebeest was definitely her problem, not mine. In the middle of her next eye roll, Sheila the traitor accepted an invitation to dance from some other guy she seemed to already know too. I realized all of a sudden that this was Sheila’s usual Friday night hangout and I wasn’t going to get home anytime soon. Mad at her and at myself for getting played, I left the table in a huff and went looking for the restroom.

When I returned Sheila was still the dancing queen of the bar and Grizzly Adams was back sitting at our table. I was about to grab my jacket off the back of a chair to move on when he introduced himself and asked if he could buy me another drink. I told him no thanks and that Sheila wasn’t interested in him so maybe he should get back to playing pool with his buddies. He admitted that he didn’t like Sheila and never had because she had a bad attitude and thought she was better than everyone else. So true! He added that he’d noticed me the moment I walked by the pool tables and I was the reason he’d come over in the first place. Taken aback by his bluntness, I had to fight a smile as I impulsively pulled out a chair to sit with him while waiting for Sheila to run out of dance partners.

I can’t remember what we talked about that night. I remember laughing a lot. I thought he was funny, but also kind of full of himself and not at all my type. He asked me to dance and I agreed to just one, probably the INXS song I’d already requested. His wild dance moves needed some fine tuning. He was also too direct and tended to share every random thought that popped into his head. He was an open book and I hadn’t read one of those in a long time. It was pretty obvious right from the start that we were polar opposites. Yet there was something really likeable about him. He asked for my phone number and in a moment of weakness I gave it to him. I warned him as I handed him the cocktail napkin I’d written it on that I wasn’t interested in being anything more than friends. He agreed with a grin and some smart-ass comment that I think was supposed to be flirtatious, but fell so flat it thunked. I finally left with Sheila, hoping he’d lose my number.

I hardly gave him another thought until he phoned me the next afternoon. Somehow, by some miracle, we fell back into the comfortable rhythm of talking about nothing and laughing about everything for a really long time. Not surprising, we still have differing opinions about what happened from there. I think we made vague plans to do something together the following weekend. He says we went out that same night. Potato, potatoh. All I know is that I must’ve felt comfortable enough to let him pick me up at my apartment. I never did that on a first date, but then this wasn’t a date.

Someone else showed up at my apartment door for that first non-date. A complete stranger. A short-haired, freshly shaved good-looking stranger who smelled nice and offered me a bouquet of pink carnations as I glanced over his shoulder down the hallway to the second-floor elevator. Who was this dreamboat and where was the Grizzly Adams I’d just intercom buzzed into the building? Laughing, he assured me they were one and the same, and then jokingly offered to go back down to the lobby to start all over again. I noticed the familiar blue eyes first and then the teeth, and I had to catch my breath for a second. Apparently the bushman’s hair had gone down the drain right after I told him I don’t date guys with beards. I still maintain I wouldn’t have said that to someone I’d just met. He says I was pretty clear about it when I gave him my phone number.

Fun snapshots in the early days.

We quickly went from not dating to seeing each other as often as possible. He claims he knew I was The One the moment he was about to take a shot at the pool table and saw me stroll by in my quote “painted on” jeans. I think I knew it when he stopped showing up with flowers and started bringing bags of groceries to fill my bare cupboards and empty fridge. One day he tossed out my you gotta kiss a lot of toads to find your prince fridge magnet while bluntly informing me he was the only toad I’d ever need. To this day he still signs most cards to me with Love, Toad.

He mostly liked country music and I never stopped loving rock bands. We couldn’t even agree on a future wedding song for our first dance. He liked Kenny Rogers and I preferred Led Zeppelin. My favourite LZ song has always been “Going to California”, which isn’t exactly first dance material. We finally agreed to have two songs. My pick was “Sea Of Love”, Robert Plant’s version from his short-lived Honeydrippers days. We’d met at the beach, after all, and it was about as Zeppelin as I was going to get at the wedding. He picked Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life”. When I think back to those early days, though, the background music in my mind begins with Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from Karate Kid 2 because it was on a mix tape of movie soundtracks we always brought along with us on summer road trips. It ends with “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, which reminds me of our many camping holidays and Richard Gere looking fine in uniform.

Slowly he started bringing more of his things to my place and leaving them there until one day he just never left. Not long after, we got engaged and then we bought a house together. Did we agree on everything? Rarely. He liked playing baseball and the great outdoors–fishing, camping, and off-road four wheeling in his truck. I mostly liked going to the movies or staying in, curled up with a stack of library books. I’m a homebody and he still drags me outdoors every chance he gets and never minds if I bring a book or my knitting. I stopped inviting him to movie theatres a long time ago because he can’t stay awake and snores too loud. My dad once joked, “the boy could fall asleep on a clothesline if he had to.” My mom decided he must have a clear conscience.

Almost thirty-four years later, we still agree that our wedding was the best one we’ve ever attended. We had so much fun at the reception that we didn’t want to leave. Finally some of our tired guests formed a long human chain and kind of just swept us out the door. We honeymooned in Hawaii for two wonderful weeks and we might not have left there either, if we hadn’t run out of money first. Newlywed life moved quickly. Our first baby arrived the following year. Two years later, we welcomed our second child. I watched those early years go by in a blur on the highest fast forward setting possible.

Now all of us, our grown children and their spouses, still get fish and chips at that same favourite hole in the wall spot at the beach. Sometimes I wonder where my life would be if I hadn’t taken that long beach walk. What if I’d said hell no instead of yes please to stepping off the sidewalk to follow the music inside? I’ve made some wrong turns along the way, but on that night I chose the right left turn.

Stay tuned for more Background Music and a little about life in the 90s. Rock on and thanks for tuning in.

Feel like following the music with me? Below are the Youtube links to the artists and music mentioned or thought about during the writing of this blog.

You Make Loving Fun – Fleetwood Mac

Purple Rain – Prince and The Revolution

Diana – Bryan Adams

What You Need – INXS (pronounced “in excess” in case you don’t know) I always want to get up and dance when I hear this song!

Need You Tonight – INXS Big love for all the 80s vibes in this video.

Never Tear Us Apart – INXS Reminds me again that Michael Hutchence was another bright light and talented songwriter who burned out far too soon. RIP 1960-1997

New Sensation – INXS (Live version)

Going to California – Led Zeppelin (Fav. live recording/video) The guitar, mandolin, and vocals still give me goosebumps.

Sea of Love – Robert Plant and The Honeydrippers version. (Great song! Strange video.)

You Decorated My Life – Kenny Rogers

Glory of Love – Peter Cetera

Up Where We Belong – Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes

Alone – Heart

Stairway to Heaven – The 2012 tribute to Led Zeppelin by Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson with the late LZ drummer John Bonham’s son on drums. I Included this more recent special performance because it’s amazing. Jimmy Page’s joy and Robert Plant’s tears are everything. I’ve only just figured out that many of the musicians I have listened to the most over the years seem to be emotionally connected to each other too.

music

Background Music III

Sue

More life lessons in the 80s.

“Shout, shout, let it all out. These are the things I can do without.”

~ Tears For Fears “Shout”

Living alone for the first time in my life was not the exciting adventure I hoped it would be. As mentioned in my previous blog post Background Music II: Forever Young, my mature parents retired from their jobs and moved far away when I was in my early twenties. It’s then that I started living pay cheque to pay cheque in a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment, paying rent and bills and a monthly bank loan on a newer, more reliable car. “Why does it always feel like there’s more month than money?” I made that joke often, but a joke is never really funny when it’s the hard truth of things.

I liked my own company, loved nothing more than a solitary afternoon of reading or tapping my story ideas onto the worn keys of my electric typewriter named Dylan. But this felt very different because I was alone and lonely at the same time. All of my closest friends were married, except for one who was still casually dating like I was. Before the ink was even dry on the apartment lease, she up and moved away for a new boyfriend and a new job. She was supposed to be my roommate and then suddenly she wasn’t in my life very much at all.

My mother checked in with me by way of long-distance phone calls once a week, which always began with four words: do you need money? I never stopped telling her I was doing just fine, even when I wasn’t. The truth of the matter? I didn’t want her to worry about me because I grew up seeing life kick her down more times than you would think humanly possible to get up from. She was my best friend and I wanted her to be happy. More than anyone she deserved retirement and to finally be free of nagging responsibilities like me, her youngest child. Of course I didn’t understand until I became a parent myself that worry doesn’t suddenly disappear in the middle of reassuring chats with grown children. I’m sure part of her respected my fierce independence because she raised me to be that way. However, it wasn’t unusual for me to find a fifty dollar bill (a small fortune then) tucked inside a drawer after one of her visits to stock my empty cupboards with groceries and fill my freezer with home cooked meals. She never could take no for an answer when it came to her kids.

Out of my five siblings, only one sister still lived in the same general vicinity as me. She was very busy with work and a young family, but she made every Sunday a standing invitation for me to come to dinner and to do my laundry at her house to spare me the cost (and the sketchiness) of the basement laundry room where I lived. I had another standing invitation most Thursday nights for dinner and “Must See TV” with a married couple I went to high school with. They had cable, I didn’t, and I also had a key to their place because I was their dog sitter. I remember telling them somewhat jokingly one evening while eating pasta and watching MTV that if Bryan Adams personally sang “Heaven” to me then I could die a happy woman. I think they took that amusing confession as their direct mission to ask all the suitable single men they knew to join us for dinner on Thursday nights. Young men who were nothing like the guys I tended to date because, according to my friends, that was only ever going to keep me on the road to loneliness and heartbreak. Why do married people always think they know what’s romantically best for their single friends? Some of the worst, most uncomfortable dinner dates I have ever endured only took place because I happened to mention Bryan Adams while slurping spaghetti.

Not that I had much spare time to enjoy living up the single life. I was too tired and too broke for it. My new full-time “good secretarial job” paid better than most jobs at the time, but it was a Monday to Friday (and even some Saturdays) fast-paced walk through living hell. Rinse and repeat eight hours a day. I worked in a very busy, very prominent medical practise for five male General Practitioners, whom I was not permitted to talk to (much less look at) unless they asked me a direct question first. This was not their office code of conduct. All five of them, ranging in age from almost retired to fresh out of medical school, were always pleasant and professional, and most of them worked so many long hours that it wasn’t unusual to find one of them sleep-standing against a wall in the brightly lit corridor of exam room doors.

This particular rule (and so many others) was laid out in actual writing by the clinic’s longtime office manager, a humourless and physically imposing fifty-something mother of eight, who never wore anything but formal dress suits (because slacks were très gauche) and thick pantyhose that made a distinctive swish-swish sound when she tried to sneak up to catch the office staff slacking. Which, of course, never happened because we were too busy typing our fingers to the bone and hurrying through whispered conversations, less we provoke the fiery wrath of the Dragon Lady inside her glass-walled office across from the main reception area. Trust me to come up with that moniker my first week on the job. Even the co-workers who’d been held prisoner under her reign of terror since before I was born began secretly referring to her as the Dragon Lady (or DL for short).

I was the newest and one of the youngest employees, and I was positive the DL hated me the most. The feeling was mutual and up until then I hadn’t ever found a reason to hate anyone. Once she called me Irma La Douce when she came upon me leaning tiredly outside an exam room door waiting to get a doctor’s signature on an important document before I could go home. I snapped to attention, even though I couldn’t tell by her normally snide expression if it was an insult or not. It seemed nobody else knew either or if they did they weren’t telling. Of course there was no Internet to reference, so I later called to ask my mother. Turned out Irma La Douce was a French prostitute played by Shirley MacLaine in a comedy of the same name that was coincidentally, according now to Google, filmed around the same time I was born. How delightful to be compared to a funny hooker by your supervisor, which was actually one of her milder insults.

I told my mom every harrowing detail of the DL’s verbal abuse during that phone conversation. She listened for a long time, first responding with a string of expletives and ending with a detailed account of what she’d do if she had five minutes alone in a room with that you-know-what. Then she told me something I hadn’t really understood until that moment: not everyone I met was going to like me. Rise above it. Don’t ever let someone like that see you crumble because they tend to thrive on weakness. And when things got too hard, Mom advised me to do what she’d been telling me to do ever since I was a child—find the nearest outdoor open space (preferably far from the family home) and yell my frustrations straight into the wind. As strangely freeing as yelling into the wind is for a kid, a young woman screaming anywhere publicly tends to get the police involved. So shouting the words along with Tears For Fears’ “Shout” in my car during the drive home from work became my fight song. Even hearing it today stirs my inner prize fighter.

There was no human resources department back then. Even if one did exist, no doubt the DL would in charge of that too and it would just be her word against mine. I won my very first round with her by making a fashion statement. Office staff were permitted only to wear white medical dress uniforms, even though none of us were nurses. The doctors had a team of nurses who efficiently assisted them in the exam rooms at the far back end of the clinic. My job was to take care of the mounds of paperwork, billing, and the scheduling of both clinic appointments and hospital surgeries. The front reception desk was the first point of entry for patients and because we were wearing uniforms we were always mistaken for nurses. If I got through a day without fighting nausea after being forced to take a closer look at someone’s enormous boil or bleeding open wound, then it was a blessed day indeed.

At the time long pencil skirts and white high neck Victorian-inspired blouses with romantic lace details and loose, billowy sleeves were in style. I managed to find a pristine white denim calf-length pencil skirt to pair with my new pretty blouse and dangling white shell earrings, and then I dared to wear the blindingly white ensemble to work one morning. I know I turned heads walking into the building—admiring glances for my cool sense of style, but mostly wide-eyed trepidation for the storm that was about to blow through the office. No sooner had I sat down at my desk, then I was summoned by speaker phone into the DL’s office. She was so livid that she forgot to ask me to close the door. I was told later that pretty much every person in the clinic, even patients in the waiting room, stopped what they were doing to listen to her (literally) dress me down. She finished off her raging rant by telling me the doctors were going to fire me on the spot once they saw my attire. My face burning with embarrassment, I somehow found the gumption to dig deep and calmly inform her that one of the doctors had just told me I look like Stevie Nicks and he didn’t seem mad about it. I kept my job, my style, and I learned how to lock and load my backbone that day.

My only escape from office politics was an hour-long lunch break that we all had to take at the same time while the doctors were off doing their hospital rounds. I began eating my sandwiches in my car at the furthest spot in the clinic’s parking lot the moment I discovered that the lunchroom was where the Dragon Lady continued to hold court like she was Marie Antoinette looking to cut off the head of any lowly serf who dared to interrupt her running commentary on world events and her brilliant children. Sometimes I read or went for walks. Sometimes I knitted a few rows on the sweater a co-worker paid me to make for her. Other times I listened to music and danced a little inside my head while staring at the cement wall of the building next door. Is there anything worse than being stuck in a job you hate because there’s no other immediate alternative? “Manic Monday” was my theme song because I was relieved to know I wasn’t the only one perpetually wishing it was Sunday. “Kissing Valentino by a crystal-blue, Italian stream” sounded pretty nice too.

This photo perfectly reflects my feelings about Tom Petty.
If I had to pick only one of his songs to listen to for the rest of my days it would be “Wildflowers“
Rest In Peace xo
Photo from TomPetty.com

Whenever I needed a hug more than I needed to shake a fist at the world, I’d pull out something a little stronger from my glove compartment for the drive home—my Tom Petty cassettes. I don’t know exactly what it is about Tom’s voice and music that makes my heaviest emotions feel about a thousand pounds lighter. All I know is that Tom Petty is still my favourite balm for the blues. You don’t have to know someone personally to mourn their death. The songwriter in him sure seemed to know me and my heart broke a little the moment I heard he died. Many times his soothing lyrics have saved me from making rash decisions in the heat of the moment, like a pep talk with an old trusted friend over several cups of coffee.

One warm Spring evening at the end of a hard work week, I was sitting in backed up traffic at a red light with the car windows rolled down, thinking about plans for the weekend and seat-dancing along to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ cheeky “Here Comes My Girl“. I know it was that song because ever since high school I used to play it, rewind and replay it, repeatedly telling “the whole wide world to shove it” right along with him. Distracted, I took a quick glance to my right at the car next to me and then did a double-take. I’m not sure if things happen the same way for everyone, but for me, more often than not, the universe likes to cast me a hi there, look what I’ve got for you now line whenever I feel like I’m sinking.

I hadn’t seen my first boyfriend since the day we broke up when we were nineteen. Now there he was four years later in the driver’s seat of his same car, looking exactly the same himself, with a stunned expression blinking back at me that wasn’t all that different from the one he had when I left him. I remember feeling a flash of uncontainable joy and then I started waving at him a little too enthusiastically, until the passenger to his right suddenly leaned forward to take a look at me. The passenger was me! Well, not me. A girl who looked very much like me. The senior high school version of me. It was unsettling, to say the least. I saw his mouth tighten as he dropped his arm out the open window to give me a small wave. Then traffic began moving and he was gone.

Once I recovered from the surprise of it, I had to laugh because, seriously, what were the odds? My amusement quickly spiralled into one of those stop-and-start fits of the giggles that lasted for a ridiculously long time. By the next morning I had overanalyzed the situation to the point of convincing myself there had to be a cosmic shift happening and I wished I had a crystal ball to figure it out. Don’t get me wrong, I suffered no residual teenage heartbreak over him, other than the usual nostalgic pangs of first love. We broke up after three years of going steady because we both agreed we were too young to get married and so much alike that even at nineteen we already seemed like an old married couple with not much left to learn about each other. While that might feel comfortable or comforting for some people, for me it felt stifling. Still, how could I not consider the what-ifs after that?

What if we were still together? What if we actually were married? Would I be happier than I am right now? Perhaps more settled? Or would there already be small cracks in our relationship, similar to the ones I was beginning to detect in some friends’ marriages? There was so much emotional unpacking going on with the help of Tom Petty that weekend, well, it was almost a relief to get back to work on Monday. Yes, Tom. “The Waiting” truly is the hardest part.

I had no clue then that this time was a significant milestone for me because I was learning how to keep my footing while taking a few solid punches along the way. Somewhere in the middle of all those what-ifs I developed a strong inkling that significant change was about to happen in my life. I worried about it too. I’ve always had a hard time dealing with change, even if it’s orchestrated by my own choices. Turned out I was right. Not long after that weekend’s existential crisis, I quite by accident met the guy I was going to one day marry. Problem was, I didn’t start off liking him much.

Stay tuned for more 80s stories, coming soon!

Below are the Youtube links to the songs or music videos mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. If you only have time for a few, then make them Tom Petty’s recordings. You may visit the 70s and early 80s in my previous posts of Background Music.

Shout – Tears For Fears

Everybody Wants to Rule The World – Tears For Fears

Heaven – Bryan Adams

Manic Monday – The Bangles

Addicted To Love – Robert Palmer

Don’t Do Me Like That – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (My favourite Live version of a very young Tom Petty)

Here Comes My Girl – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

The Waiting – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Refugee – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around – Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty

Later Tom Petty recordings that I’m including because I love them too.

Free Fallin’

I Won’t Back Down (Some familiar faces in this one)

Handle With Care – Tom Petty with the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys

Wildflowers (Home recording & video) This is the posthumous release of the home recorded and filmed version of the song—joyful for me to watch and at the same time profoundly bittersweet.

reading

July & Joni

Sue

I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all. ~ Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now.

The first song that springs to mind when I think about life in the early 1970s is “Both Sides Now”. Originally recorded by Judy Collins, the song was written by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and, in my opinion, should only ever be performed by Joni. If you listen to it now, then listen to Joni sing it and you will hear the clear poetic difference in how she feels her own words.

The meaning of this song for me represents childhood slipping away. Hearing Joni sing it always makes me teary, and it shifts my mind back inside long ago summer days spent zipping along the streets of suburbia with neighbourhood friends. Black Cat gum and brand-new white Keds, grass-stained within hours of taking them out of the box. A pocket transistor radio strapped with hair elastics to the plunging handlebars of my sparkly purple Mustang banana-seat bicycle, tinnily blasting the top ten CFUN summer hits in my wake. The earthy tar smell of hot black topped pavement melting in July. Hopscotch, kick ball, and red rover. Flimsy roller skates that tighten around shoes with a special key that I wore on a string around my sun-warmed neck. For me, all of this nostalgia and more are in the lyrics of Both Sides Now. Even the opening line “rows and flows of angel hair” is a tender reminder that I’d first misinterpreted it as bowls and bowls of angel hair. Perhaps I’d been hoping pasta was on the supper menu that evening.

Although Both Sides Now is Joni’s song of my childhood, my longtime favourite has always been A Case of You from her iconic album Blue. It’s rumoured to be written about her break-up with either Graham Nash or Leonard Cohen. I like to think it’s about Cohen because it doesn’t get more Canadian than that. The opening verses are heartbreak wrapped in biting savagery and I adore it:

“Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as a northern star
And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at?
If you want me I’ll be in the bar’

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh, Canada
With your face sketched on it twice…”

Recently I came across an article written about a new novel that’s loosely inspired by the early rise of Joni Mitchell’s career and her love affair with singer James Taylor. Of course I had to read it! Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie (publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021) begins in the year 1969 at a fictional folk music festival where we are first introduced to local singer Jane Quinn and her band the Breakers. Jane and the band are the last-minute replacement performers on the main stage after the headline performer, folk singer Jesse Reid, is injured in a motorcycle accident on his way to the festival.

“James Taylor” by Joni Mitchell from her book Morning Glory on the Vine

Jane and Jesse develop a relationship while he is recovering from his injuries that first begins as a shared love of songwriting and quickly develops into a passionate, often torturous love affair that spans many years. The story follows Jane’s rocky ride in the 1970s music industry and her deeply personal relationships with Jesse, her band members, and her family. All of this unfolds around her desire to be recognized for her talent and still remain in control of her career at a time when women’s opinions were the least heard in a room of male executives.

The heart of this novel is a love story, but the backbone for me is a young woman’s search for the illusive balance between self-fulfillment and obligation to loved ones. I read Songs in Ursa Major in one day because I had to know what becomes of Jane from the first pages when she steps barefooted onto the stage and her life instantly changes. I related so much to this feisty character and her determination to remain true to her young self.

I kept thinking about Joni Mitchell’s country-inspired hit You Turn Me On I’m A Radio while reading Jane’s story. Music industry execs want Jane to write catchy hits for the radio instead of honest music inspired by her life experiences. Joni’s response to the same request in her career famously mocked her recording label manager with these lyrics:

“I’m a broadcasting tower
Waving for you
And I’m sending you out
This signal here
I hope you can pick it up
Loud and clear
I know you don’t like weak women
You get bored so quick
And you don’t like strong women
‘Cause they’re hip to your tricks
It’s been dirty for dirty
Down the line
But you know I come when you whistle
When you’re loving and kind
But if you’ve got too many doubts
If there’s no good reception for me
Then tune me out, ’cause honey
Who needs the static
It hurts the head…”

The complete lyrics are here.

Untitled (and my favourite drawing) by Joni Mitchell: Morning Glory on the Vine

Another book I enjoy immensely is Joni Mitchell’s Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs & Drawings (publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). In 1971, as her groundbreaking album Blue became a commercial success all around the world, Christmas came along and Joni struggled with what presents to give her nouveau riche friends. In the end she decided to give them each a handmade book filled with a collection of her songs, poems and drawings that she called “The Christmas Book”. The edition remained private amongst friends until it was recently published, a present to all of her fans.

There have been many creative influences in my life and sometimes hearing a song or reading passages from a poem or book reminds me to be thankful for those brave souls who put their whole hearts into words, even knowing that some might not understand a single word of it.

Joni Mitchell says it best in a letter to her friends, “Well I know you can’t really knock something till you know it–inside and out–all sides. And I find that then, when you understand it, it’s hard to knock it. You just feel it–laugh or cry.”