Tag: rock music

music, writing life

If Wishes Were Horses

Sue

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” ~ Scottish proverb & nursery rhyme

I have a story that began last week and also a very long time ago. I wasn’t going to share it, but when I told a friend about it and saw her reaction, I realized I wanted to write it down to think about it some more. First I need to give a bit of backstory to (hopefully) help it make more sense for anyone who hasn’t read my previous posts about why I started writing again after thirty years. It’s complicated, but to keep it short: I now have the space and time in my life to allow the creative process to take over because that’s what it does for me. It completely takes over. In the space of a year I wrote a novel, and then I rewrote it several times more. Finally satisfied, I sent query emails to a couple of literary agents along with the first chapter. And then I started writing a second novel that’s a spin-off from the first one. About halfway through the second novel, I realized this story could not exist until I was truly happy with the first one. Confusing, I know.

It was summer by then and I decided to step away from my desk to get out of my head and spend more time outdoors. The younger writer I used to be would’ve told myself to quit overthinking the process and press on. This older version understands after living a long time that creativity is not a race to the finish line. It’s a marathon of uphill climbs. Something wasn’t working for a reason and I needed space to figure out why. By fall, I was itching to write again, but still not ready to revisit the two novels. So instead I read insightful memoirs about writing written by published authors. One of those was Stephen King’s “On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft”. I’d read it once before when it was published about twenty years ago and can’t remember what I thought about it then. This time, however, I found myself dog-earing pages and highlighting paragraphs to read again and again. Above all else, one idea of his particularly inspired me and I’m paraphrasing it here: if two separate stories aren’t working, try combining them into one. It was as if a light turned on in my imagination. And so begins a different (yet familiar) novel…

I borrowed a character from each of my two novels and I made them sisters. I made them my age. I took a lake from one story and a small town from the other and I relocated it and combined it under one made up name. The setting is loosely based on two places I spent a lot of time in during my late teens and early adulthood. Hope, B.C. where my parents had their retirement house, and on Cultus Lake where I spent many long summer days hanging out with friends. I made the two sisters complete opposites, telling their story from very different perspectives and outlooks on life. In other words, one chapter is told by one sister and the next one is narrated by the other one, and so on. In order to create and keep track of their unique voices, I’ve had to mentally envision them as Nice Sister and Mean Sister. Not their names, of course, just their attitudes. And not surprising, Mean Sister’s perspective has become the most fun to write.

It’s a story as old as time. Siblings who must confront a shared past while temporarily stuck together in the present moment. It’s summertime in a small, lakeside town. There’s a cast of quirky, secondary characters–the townsfolk–who have secrets and troubles of their own. The sisters grew up here, abandoned by their superstar mother in the early seventies so she could freely chase her rock and roll dreams. Then they’re reunited with her as teenagers in the late seventies to become her backup singers for one summer tour. Now in their fifties, the sisters are forced to reconcile the past in order to move forward in their present lives. And because this is written by me, there must be humour to even out the drama, and great background music to give it a dreamy, nostalgic feel. My comfort tunes, mainly from the sixties, seventies and eighties. The music that has shaped my own life and inspired me to dream. The first chapter begins at the present time, with Nice Sister about to take a shower when the doorbell rings….She answers it to receive an unexpected gift package from an unknown person. While this has no meaning right now, it does later on in my real-life story–which I will get to very soon, I promise.

Chapter five, at exactly 13,793 words, I mopped one of the sisters, figuratively speaking, into a corner and I had to wait for the floor to dry for the next scene to unfold in my mind. I was as stuck as she was. While staring at a blank page, the cursor blinking at me, I suddenly typed this from the character’s perspective: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. My grandma used to say that, I think. Or maybe I’d heard it in a song.” My paternal grandmother did used to say that to me often when I was a kid. I’d tell her I wish I had this or I wish I could do that and she’d give me that horses line. It’s a Scottish proverb and a verse in a very old nursery rhyme. I had no idea why she was calling me a beggar because all I’d done was state the truth. My own sisters have said that as a toddler I used to tell them, “I wish I was a mouse so I could climb into your pocket and go with you.” A storyteller, even then. As for the song part, it was also familiar to me in a warmly nostalgic way, but I couldn’t place it. So I went on a Google deep dive, as the curious tend to do when avoiding work. This is what I remembered…

In seventh grade there was a song that played so often on local radio station CFUN that I ended up making a poster of it in art class. “Roxy Roller” by the Vancouver glam rock band Sweeney Todd. Nick Gilder was the front man of the band at that time. He left shortly after ST became successful to pursue a solo career–also a story as old as time. That was when local boy Bryan Adams, at only sixteen, became the front “man” for a short time and he’s featured on Sweeney Todd’s album “If Wishes Were Horses”. It’s considered a very rare album now because not many are still in circulation, or so I’ve discovered. Kind of niche, and only something Canadians, more specifically British Columbians that were teens in 1977 might still fondly remember. For reasons unknown, it’s nearly impossible now to listen online to Bryan Adams’ full version of “If Wishes Were Horses”. Trust me, I did the dive. Bryan’s voice was very different then and not at all the raspy, familiar voice of the eighties and onwards. He also had a solo disco song in his late teens that I used to dance to with friends called, appropriately, “Let Me Take You Dancing”. He had the voice of an angel then, although he may beg to differ now.

I decided one evening at around ten o’clock–the perfect time to make rash decisions–that I needed to get my hands on that old album again for the sake of my writing. Somehow it had written itself into my story and I needed to understand why. I’d already found one available for sale on Etsy that was being sold by a local seller in Vancouver. This person, a woman I later discovered, has very good reviews and a ton of used vinyl sales. It was reasonably priced. It was in excellent condition. It was local. I used to love it. All signs pointed to go! I paid for it and that was that. I was about to shut my laptop and go to bed to read when, almost instantly, I got an email notification from the seller. I thought about leaving it until the morning, but I wondered if there was a problem with the sale. So I read the long message and I was surprised by all of it. Astounded, actually. I decided not to respond until morning in order to process what I’d just read. I stayed awake for a long time thinking about it. About life, about being young, about how our best dreams rarely change, and how we sometimes take the long way to get to where we’re meant to be. And by two in the morning, how just one message can lead to a very long, restless night.

What the seller told me was that she laughed when my album purchase came in late at night because she’d just been coincidentally in my area shopping earlier that same day. It’s funny how life goes sometimes, isn’t it? Yes, it is, we agreed. We’ve had more email conversations since that first one and this is where the story turns from haha to are you kidding me? Turns out she is a writer and music lover like me, who recently started writing again after closing her business, also like me, shortly following the pandemic. She now lives in the very place I am currently writing about–Cultus Lake. We are around the same age and both grandmothers. We love books and vintage finds. She sells her found treasures online, I just collect mine. Oh, and by the way, she was Bryan Adams’ high school girlfriend right before he left to join Sweeney Todd to be on the album I’d just purchased.

I’ll let that sink in…

Early in the morning, two days later, I was getting ready to take a shower when the doorbell rang. A package was left by our Canada Post carrier on the doorstep. Sound familiar? Unlike my character’s gift package that I wrote about several weeks before this day, my gift package was from myself. The “If Wishes Were Horses” album. Tucked inside was a postcard note from the seller giving me her best wishes on my story and a few other personal tidbits I’ll keep to myself. For some reason I was nervous about playing the album, specifically that song. Was I expecting too much? Had this gotten so blown out of proportion that I was romanticizing it into something more than it is? The answer is, it’s everything I needed to hear at exactly the right moment.

When I finally sat down to listen to Bryan’s much younger, angelic voice sing the lyrics I believe he co-wrote at a time when he was probably hoping all of his music dreams would come true, it made me unexpectedly emotional and even more introspective. I thought about my own dreams at fourteen. I saw myself so clearly, listening to this same song. Maybe I was thinking about the singer, imagining who he was because nobody really knew him then. Maybe I was thinking about my grandma too, who used to say the same thing to me. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I’d lost her at thirteen, yet here she was again in a song. Now, after thinking about it some more, I’ve come to realize that my younger writing self is reminding this current self to keep believing in the creative process, no matter how long it takes to sort the story out. That’s why I’m sharing it now, just in case you need a reminder to keep following your story.

If Wishes Were Horses, Sweeney Todd lyrics

“Come with me you can wish upon a star
You can do all the things that you’ve longed to
And you won’t have to wonder who you are
You can be anybody you want to
In a land full of promises and kings
All your best laid dreams are for catchin’
You can have the world to tie up on a string
Just close your eyes and imagine
If wishes were horses
Beggars would ride
All dreams and desires would ride along side
Worries and troubles would fall off behind
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride

To a land far or near come along
There’s an all new-round everyday glow
Like the young girl sang in the song
‘Somewhere over the rainbow'”

If Wishes Were Horses (featuring Bryan Adams)
Sweeney Todd – back cover photo of Bryan Adams

reading

Book Talk: High Fidelity

Sue

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

I’ve been on a reading binge lately. This tends to happen more in the summer when it’s light enough to relax on the porch with a book after dinner. Lately I’ve had the urge to revisit both contemporary and classic novels I read a long time ago. Not sure why exactly, though I’ve been doing the same thing with music so maybe it all comes down to age and nostalgia. A couple of weeks ago, I came across Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity while browsing the shelves of the same bookstore I used to work at when this book was released in the mid-nineties. I stocked the fiction shelves then and no doubt kept restocking this one at the height of its popularity. Nice that it’s still there.

The narrator Rob is thirty-five, a little older than me the first time I read it, and we had similar taste in music and I suppose we still do. Rob owns a failing record store in London, which reminds me why I never watched the movie version of the book. In the movie John Cusack owns a record store in Chicago. The main appeal of this novel for me is that the characters and setting are delightfully British. Rob’s longtime, live-in girlfriend Laura has just left him and he is both miserable and relieved about it until he begins to search a little deeper for the reasons why all of his relationships have failed so miserably. For once he can’t seem to find refuge from his problems in his huge record collection or by working in his store. Even his two offbeat employees and quirky customers have begun to infuriate him more than normal. The premise reminds me of Hugh Grant in the movie Notting Hill–the way Hugh’s character only stocked travel books and would grumpily chase out visitors who came in asking for popular fiction. Rob does the exact same thing if a customer has what he considers bad taste in music. Since High Fidelity (the novel) came before Notting Hill, is it safe to assume Hornby’s character Rob was the inspiration for Hugh Grant’s reserved bookstore character? Interesting…I hadn’t made that connection until now.

One day Rob takes a hard look around and notices this about his business, “The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted–this is what record shops should look like, and only Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat–and partly because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.”

Like Rob, I’m not a fan of Phil’s band Genesis, so this paragraph made me chuckle and it probably did in the nineties, too. It also effectively shows us that the state of Rob’s store mirrors the current state of his mind. While he tries to sort out the reasons why Laura suddenly dumped him by visiting former girlfriends who did the same to him over the years, he meets a free-spirited, female American recording artist, who’s just moved to his neighbourhood and performs often at the local pub. In my imagination I kept picturing the character of Marie as a young Joni Mitchell. I wanted much more of Marie’s background story! What about her romantic hopes and music dreams? Why doesn’t any of that matter when her character is pivotal to the plot? Anyway, Rob and Marie begin a casual relationship, and while it seems it’s what Rob has always wanted–no strings, no commitments–he soon realizes that the things his ex-girlfriend Laura wants (marriage, kids, stability, soft rock music, etc.) aren’t quite so terrifying to him anymore. Can he get Laura back or is it already too late? (No ending spoilers here.)

Rereading this book was a different, more thoughtful experience. Rob’s snarky attitude and self-absorption certainly irritated me now, although I found myself laughing all over again at his sarcastic observations about pop culture and some of the music that came out of the eighties and nineties. I still admire the way Nick Hornby wrote this book–with unflinching, biting honesty. He doesn’t turn Rob into a likeable guy as the character searches for deeper self-awareness. He keeps Rob grumpy, neurotic, and reluctant to change. I still rooted for him, though, because change at every stage in life is hard. I like to think even Rob in his later years would find his younger self irritating and sometimes cringy. Like reading a stream of consciousness page in an old tattered diary penned a lifetime ago. Before we discover we’re not the centre of the universe.

It feels like a mellow Joni Mitchell kind of afternoon as I write this post. I’m not sure if Rob the record store owner would chase me out for asking for this amazing album, but I wouldn’t hesitate to debate him (or anyone) about the genius of Joni’s songwriting. That’s the beauty of the albums we treasure, each song is a marker tucked between the pages of some of our fondest memories.

Rob asks us this, “Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.” 

music

The A Side

Sue

“What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.” 
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems

This year marks a milestone birthday for me. I suppose every year is a marker of some kind, first marking our starting point and then where we are now. This new marker has me feeling particularly nostalgic and I’m not sure that would be the case had the events of the past few years gone differently and made me less introspective. In any case, I have a story about nostalgia and it begins with music, yet again.

One Saturday in November my husband and I decided to visit a vintage holiday marketplace. We were there mostly for the retro atmosphere, to get into the festive spirit, and perhaps find some one-of-a-kind gifts. Most of the vendors were selling new and used Christmas decor, and we enjoyed ourselves for an hour or so, laughing over the many antique decorations we recalled seeing in our childhood homes and other people’s harvest gold or avocado green living rooms in the seventies. There was a lot of “do you remember this?” And “my grandma had one just like that!” Items we might have considered tacky as children were now whimsically magical and worthy of a second look. So on we went, browsing here and there, and sometimes gasping in unison at the elevated prices of those same tacky knickknacks. Eventually we grew tired and were heading for the exit door when a small booth caught my eye. It immediately drew me in like a magnet because it was filled with cardboard boxes of used records. That was it, nothing else, and not one sparkly holiday decoration in sight. Just a few portable tables lined with open boxes of vinyl. I flipped through one stack and the first album I happened to pull out for a closer look was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

I held it in both hands and read all the song titles, probably with a sappy grin on my face. I have fond memories of that album. I heard it for the first time in an all-girls, junior high school gym class by way of a young and therefore cool female teacher, who played “Don’t Stop” on a portable record player at the start of every class, while we performed warm up exercises to it before heading outside for the long distance run we all dreaded. Even now, hearing that uplifting song makes me think about sideways stretches, jumping jacks, and high kicks in terry cloth gym shorts. Some administrator with a mean streak decided in the second semester to make us fourteen year old girls share gym time with grade twelve boys. They quickly took to stretching with us to Fleetwood Mac and only because our young teacher was attractive. Awkwardness ensued, mostly for the already awkward girls like me, who had no idea where to look and suddenly forgot the sequence of every move. One day the guys had a substitute teacher show up for their class. I heard all about Mr. Hot Teacher ahead of leaving the change room. The second I did, I spotted him and then excitedly called out his first name as I ran across the gym to envelope him in a fierce hug. He was my big brother’s best friend, ten years older than me, who’d first started hanging around our house when I was still in diapers. I didn’t stop to think how it must look to everyone gaping at us. Then I made it worse by loudly announcing in the echoing gym how much I missed him coming over to the house. Let’s just say there were whispers, raised eyebrows, and sidelong glances directed at me during that particular warm up. My brother’s friend and I laughed about it when we saw each other again several years later. Vivid memories like these prove that music is the soundtrack of life. At that time, a magical kind of marker made of shiny vinyl.

Strangely, I considered buying the record while standing in the marketplace booth. It was only five dollars for a bit of nostalgia that made me smile. I couldn’t remember the last time I looked at an LP, much less bought one. Yet there I was still gripping it with both hands, reluctant to let it go. The vendor was a woman about my age and for a moment we warmly reminisced about our favourite rock bands. She told me that she’d hung onto her teenage albums for many years. Then one sad day, she was involved in a highway motor vehicle accident in the Fraser Canyon while in the middle of moving house. Her box of records flew out of the back of her truck on impact and tumbled a long way down to the river at the bottom of a steep, rocky hillside. Lost forever. She said she was physically fine after the accident, but was sure her heart had broken a little that day, just like her records. Over the years since then, she’d rebuilt an even larger vinyl collection, but had far too many now and felt it was time to let some go. My husband was patiently waiting for me, so I tucked Rumours back inside the box, telling her I didn’t have a turntable. She told me that was easily fixable. Is it? I wondered. Then I thanked her for her time and carried on, thinking it might be kind of fun to have a turntable again. Silly, though. Why would I bother when I already had the ability to listen to Fleetwood Mac anytime I felt like it? What was the point of going back in time? Why add unnecessary clutter to a home already filled with too much stuff? So that was that. End of story. Until it wasn’t.

A few weeks later, I was scrolling through online Black Friday deals when I came across a suitcase-style, portable turntable that was similar to the one I used to tote around with me when I was a kid. Only this new modern one was nicer and a much better colour than the plain, two-toned brown one that my parents gave to me one long ago Christmas morning. It was also on sale and a reasonable price by today’s standards for something frivolous. So I purchased it on a whim, then proceeded to forget about it over the days to come while busy gift buying for family and friends. It wasn’t until early December that I received a shipping notification for the purchase. I was surprised how quickly I’d forgotten about it, and then found myself daydreaming about setting up the turntable over the holidays to listen to the small collection of combined records that my husband and I had stored away…somewhere. I told him I remembered seeing them not that long ago, and he laughed at me because he said it had been years since we last saw them. Besides, he was pretty sure we’d sold them at a garage sale or donated them, he couldn’t remember which. I felt like an idiot and my embarrassment must have shown on my face because he made a valiant effort to go searching for what he knew had to be long gone. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. He was hoping that he was wrong about it. That maybe the years had blurred both our memories and somewhere a box was buried like a forgotten time capsule. No such luck. They were gone and I felt unreasonably sad about it. I was being silly again, no doubt about it. Clearly those records had meant little to me or they’d still be hanging around, just like the dusty, treasured books I’ve hung onto for years because I still can’t part with any of them.

So now I had a turntable on its way and nothing to play on it. I kept thinking about the Fleetwood Mac one I’d recently let slip through my fingers. My husband reminded me I could buy records in secondhand shops and even new albums, if I really wanted them. Problem was, I wanted my old ones back. I wanted to remember what I’d once decided to keep, even after there wasn’t a use for them anymore. The special ones. The soundtrack of my youth. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t visualize the albums that were missing. Soon I realized this wasn’t about the lost records. It was about time moving too quickly to fully comprehend its swift passage. If I could forget about not holding onto those records, what else might I forget in the years to come? I thought about the woman who’d rebuilt her teenage album collection after everything had gone tumbling down a hillside. I didn’t want to rebuild my old collection. I didn’t even really want a new collection. What I was searching for was the girl who used to somehow balance a thick stack of albums under one arm, while also firmly clutching the handle of a suitcase turntable. Somewhere in time, she’s skipping her way to her best friend’s house to share the A side of a new record because every vinyl collector knows the A side has the best and most memorable songs.

As for the new turntable? It got lost in the mail over the Christmas delivery rush. Then it got rerouted and I forgot about it all over again. Miraculously, it showed up on my doorstep on New Year’s Day, of all days. A gift from past me to present me. And a reminder that everything important reveals itself again at exactly the right time.

Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac (Official Music Video) Hope the song makes you smile!

reading

Somewhere Else

Sue

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.” ~ From “Just Kids” by Patti Smith

I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” about an early time in her life during her relationship with famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a short book and I could probably read it in one sitting, but I’ve been taking my time because it’s one of those captivating stories that can’t be rushed. It wants to be pondered, with entire passages read and then reread. Their meeting is a chance encounter that happens shortly after Patti moves to New York in the late sixties to pursue her dream of being a poet and artist. These are the years before Patti became a singer-songwriter icon, a prelude to her fame. At the time, Robert Mapplethorpe was also a struggling artist and their different yet similar worlds collided one day when she was working in a shop and sold him a particular necklace she coveted for herself. When I wrapped it and handed it to him, I said impulsively, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.” I was immediately embarrassed, but he just smiled and said, “I won’t.”

Patti and Robert lived together on and off for several years. They were the definition of starving artists, working at low-paying jobs to survive, while fearlessly creating their art during a turbulent time when art, music and politics were at war with each other and sometimes free thinkers were violently assassinated. For a brief time, the two of them found a home at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, where they formed friendships with other artists, poets, actors, musicians, writers and the many lost souls living there. Some residents were already well-known by the late sixties and early seventies, some died while chasing their dreams from the rooms of that hotel, and others, like Patti and Robert, became famous later on.

Ironically, their individual successes were reached by way of the very mediums they avoided at the time. Patti wanted to be a prolific poet, not a songwriter. It was others who encouraged her to perform, to sing the words she wrote in her notebooks. Robert created collages out of other people’s magazine photographs and claimed to not have the patience to take his own photos to depict his provocative art. Their love story was profound, tumultuous, often joyful, and also heartbreaking. We already know they didn’t stay together forever, but even over time and distance, they continued to support one another, calling each other their star, “the blue star of our destiny”. Early in the book Patti described Robert in one foreshadowing sentence: I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.

Patti & Robert at the Chelsea Hotel, NY – photo credit unknown

While Patti and Robert were in their early twenties, chasing their creative dreams in New York, I was a young Canadian child living in the suburbs, running around the neighbourhood with my friends, and also hiding myself in my bedroom for hours with stacks of library books. At the same time I scribbled my thoughts into composition notebooks that eventually formed my own long, rambling stories. “Just Kids” has brought me back to the beginning of my creativity. I didn’t take Patti’s starving artist route in my later writing years. I never really wanted for anything. I grew up comfortably, never going to bed hungry or feeling unloved or yearning to escape. But, like Patti Smith, I was a daydreamer and many times felt misunderstood. She said of herself, I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else.

I was always somewhere else, too. My paternal grandmother taught me how to read long before I went to school by reading with me all the time. Early on I discovered how to lose myself in a story. We read storybooks together first and then children’s classic novels. Once we completed a book, she never asked me if I enjoyed the story. She always asked me how it made me feel. I didn’t know it at the time, but what a gift she gave me in that simple question. Thinking about that put me directly into the story and set the course on how I view writing today. I observe all art with feeling. I can’t listen to music without thinking about what the lyrics mean to the songwriter and to me. I can’t look at a painting and not wonder what the artist was going through emotionally at the time. I always look beyond the layers to somewhere deeper, somewhere else.

I feel fortunate to have grown up at a time, and in household, where books and movies, art and music were discussed at length. There wasn’t an outside world of knowledge for me to Google. My opinions and interpretations were always my own and I was often encouraged to share them. Patti and Robert’s story has made me long to relive the hours I spent discussing a novel with another bookworm friend over many cups of Red Rose Orange Pekoe tea. How one single observation made me reread chapters because I was convinced I’d missed something important. I feel nostalgic for long ago car rides, trying to decipher lyrics in a song on the radio because I’d always heard it one way, while another passenger heard something else. How many times have I sat in a car in the dark, shivering, as I discussed and dissected a movie just seen in a theatre with a sibling, a best friend or a boyfriend? Countless times. Wondrous times.

These days I–and maybe we–consume and don’t take the time to reflect before we move onto the next interesting thing. I’m reminded of my husband’s grandfather, who lived with us for a short time when we were first starting our lives together. He’d yell upstairs to me from his downstairs suite whenever his failing memory couldn’t provide an answer he needed, usually from a book he read a long time ago. We shared a love of literature and poetry, and maybe we understood each other a little better than most. Kindred spirits. If we’re lucky, we get to meet a few of those over a lifetime. I’d always dig deep to try to remember whatever he was asking because there was no internet then, no external way of fact checking on the spot. I soon grew to understand he wasn’t really searching for an easy answer, anyway. He was looking to relive the experience, the feeling a particular story once gave him. It was his way of asking me to come downstairs to talk about it with him without telling me that’s what he needed. Companionship. Understanding. A brief moment somewhere else.

As this year comes to an end, I once again find myself surrounded by stacks of books, notebooks, and manuscript pages. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I find myself here again. Back at the beginning, to the daydreamer I used to be. I rediscovered this year it’s an important part of me and I’ve been missing that key to myself. December feels like the perfect time to savour Patti’s words–her voice calling up from downstairs, reminding me to take more time to let my mind wander and ponder before moving onto the next interesting thing.

It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all. ~ Patti Smith, “Just Kids”

Just Kids by Patti Smith

music

Background Music VI: Given to Fly

Sue

“I think music is the greatest art form that exists, and I think people listen to music for different reasons, and it serves different purposes. Some of it is background music, and some of it is things that might affect a person’s day, if not their life, or change an attitude. The best songs are the ones that make you feel something.” ~ Eddie Vedder

Two years ago in the middle of everything going on in the world, my writing muse decided to talk to me again after many years of complete radio silence. It wasn’t the right time. There were a lot of scary things happening. I was fearful for the well-being of my family and my business that I’d worked hard at for fourteen years. Everyone was going through similar fears and some faced worse tragedies. It was a lot to wrap the mind around and I didn’t need extra voices in my head feeding me dialogue for stories I didn’t want to write. One day I’ll share why I think that happened, and where the voices of my characters keep leading me. Right now I want to tell another story that relates to Eddie Vedder’s quote at the top of this page, one I happened to stumble upon while doing music research for the plot of the novel I couldn’t not start writing.

I stopped writing after my mom died in the late nineties. Truthfully, I stopped doing a lot of creative things. The very essence of creativity is feeling. I couldn’t even read a book beyond the first page. I had only enough energy in me to keep moving forward because, like it or not, life went on and people expected you to show up for it. While still grieving for Mom, we learned that Dad’s cancer was back and this time it was horribly aggressive. As devastating as it was to lose a parent suddenly, seeing another battle terrible pain over a long period of time was emotionally brutal. It was a lot to deal with. The first thing I did was quit my job. It was a part-time job working in a bookstore. It was something I did mostly for myself and for the great discount on books, and I loved every minute of it. But I wasn’t sleeping properly and it meant a long drive to work. I wasn’t in the right emotional head space for it. I still tended to burst into tears without warning. So it was just one more enjoyable thing I let go because I was mentally exhausted.

Closer to Christmas, one of the managers at the bookstore called to ask me if I’d come back to help out over the holidays. I was honest and told her I could barely face myself most days, so how was I supposed to face customers? She told me this new temporary position only required me to work weekdays, early in the morning from seven to eleven, shelving books and creating holiday displays. Since the doors didn’t open for customers until eleven, I wouldn’t have to see anyone except a couple of other co-workers. I was tempted. The hours fit perfectly around my husband’s work schedule. He was able to get our kids ready for school each day and I’d be home in plenty of time to pick them up. I thought hard about it and realized I wanted to do it, if only for the distraction from grief. The manager had no idea what she did for me with that call. Or maybe she did because I ended up staying on for years afterwards, even moving to a new store location closer to my home and into full-time hours. That job eventually handed me back motivation and my confidence.

I had to leave the house by six-fifteen to get to work on time. Every morning I left with a big travel mug of coffee and the hope I’d get through the day without crying in public. I couldn’t listen to music during the drive in the predawn darkness. I’d move the dial from one radio station to the next, but every song made me feel something I didn’t want to feel. I tried different CDs I had on hand. It was the same thing. So I drove in silence until my thoughts got to be too much and I’d start all over switching stations again. One morning I settled on a hard rock station. A song came on and I found myself smiling at a memory from back at the start of the nineties.

One time while my mom was staying with me, we decided to take along my toddler and baby to go visit my sister and her family. This sister lived close to me, but I didn’t see her much then because she worked long hours and was busy with teenaged sons, and I was busy adapting to new motherhood. When we got there, I heard music blasting from one of my nephew’s bedrooms in the basement and I was intrigued by what I was hearing. I wandered downstairs by myself and knocked on his door. It took several attempts to get his attention because the music was so loud. Finally he pulled the door open with a sullen expression that instantly softened when he saw it was me trying to invade his space. He hugged me and invited me into his messy room. I’m thirteen years older than him and I’d spent a lot of time babysitting him and his brother when I was around the same age he was then. I was still the cool adult, I guess, and perhaps considered young enough to remember what it was like to want to hear angsty rock music at the highest volume possible. I asked him what he was listening to and he tossed me the CD of his new favourite rock band Pearl Jam. The album was called Ten. I read the song titles. Interesting, I thought. I’d never heard of them. I’d heard of Nirvana and knew about the Seattle grunge music scene, which I’d decided wasn’t all that different from the hard rock and punk rock I’d liked when I was about his age. It just wasn’t where I was in my life musically anymore. My playlist at the time was softer, calmer. Less frenzied.

“You gotta hear this one,” my nephew told me as he started a song over. I sat on the edge of his bed to listen. The song was “Alive”. The emotion and the raw intensity of how the lyrics were sung burrowed into my chest to grip my twenty-eight year old heart. I asked him to play it again, at a lower volume this time. Then I asked him, “Do you think it’s a true story?” It had to be true. There was no way it couldn’t be. It was just too intense. My nephew shrugged. He was focused on the driving beat, while the writer in me heard lasting pain in the songwriter’s words. I’ve since learned that it is indeed a true story about when Eddie Vedder was a teenager and his mother told him the man who’d raised him wasn’t his real father, and that his birth father had recently died. Even if he’d wanted to, it was already too late for him to come to grips with it. There’s other trauma in the song too. I don’t know if that part is real, only the songwriter does. We listened to some more of the album before I went back upstairs to my kids.

A fun nineties photo – New York Times

I remember thinking I would’ve loved this band if I was my nephew’s age. Their music was emotional and honest and electrifying. I thought they were closer to his age than mine. I made that assumption based on the fact he related to them so well. I had no idea then that band members are my age and what I heard that day was many of the same rock band influences. The Stones. The Who. Pink Floyd. My beloved Led Zeppelin. More than anything, it had just felt good to be allowed into someone else’s personal space to hear what was currently most important to them. It reminded me of the times my brothers had let me sit quietly with them to listen to their rock albums. Or when they gave me a new cassette of older music because they thought my teenaged taste could use some fine tuning. It’s the feeling of belonging in a moment, just as you are.

“Alive” came on the radio that morning while I was driving to work, just before dawn lit up the sky for another day without my mom. I smiled tentatively and upped the volume to sing along. Who answers? Yeah. That is the question. It was the first time I’d heard a song in a long time that didn’t graze the edges of my grief and make me want to weep. I was only sad when it ended. I wanted that alive feeling back again, no matter how briefly it lasted. After my shift at the bookstore, I went and bought all the Pearl Jam CDs I could find. I stashed them under the driver’s seat and played them every time I was alone in the car. Alive brought me back to their music, but it was “Given to Fly” that reached my heart this time around.

“He could’ve tuned in, tuned in
But he tuned out
A bad time, nothing could save him
Alone in a corridor, waiting, locked out
He got up outta there, ran for hundreds of miles
He made it to the ocean, had a smoke in a tree
The wind rose up, set him down on his knee

A wave came crashing like a fist to the jaw
Delivered him wings, “Hey, look at me now”
Arms wide open with the sea as his floor
Oh, power, oh

He’s flying
Whole
High, wide, oh…”

There’s many interpretations of what the song is about. Eddie Vedder has only ever said it’s a children’s fable. Recently I learned it might’ve been loosely inspired by my most loved Zeppelin song “Going to California”, which explains a lot. For me it’ll always be about accepting emotional pain and then not allowing it to overcome me. “And he still gives his love, he just gives it away. The love he receives is the love that is saved.” Hearing those words makes me feel stronger and reminds me how fortunate I am to have always been well-loved and supported throughout my life. For that alone I’d say it’s my favourite. Pearl Jam’s music helped me to get back to myself during a very hard time and I’ve never forgotten it. This is my thank you letter to them.

Flying! Photo credit to New York Times, Wrigley Field

I first saw Eddie Vedder sing “Black” live a long time ago in the MTV Unplugged series. He didn’t just sing it, he lived it. For me it’s the most deeply personal song about heartbreak ever written and performed. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve rewatched that performance, and all the others in the set, since rediscovering Pearl Jam yet again in 2020. Coincidentally right at a time when I needed another emotional lifeline tossed my way. In 2020 I started on the path of making some crucial personal decisions. I was looking for signs that I was doing the right things at a confusing time. Those timeless MTV Unplugged sessions led me to more of their concert performances on Youtube, recorded at different times throughout their thirtysomething years together. I needed to hear these guys again and there they were. They’ve aged, of course, just like me. They’ve grown softer around the edges, less defiant. More mellow. Well, same here. They still have important stories to tell, and so do I.

They’re one of the few rock bands whose founding members have managed to stay alive (pun not intended) and together, with the exception of drummers until Matt Cameron came along, and the addition of Hawaiian-born keyboardist Boom Gaspar. They live in the Pacific Northwest and Eddie has a second home in Hawaii. I think their vibe might be warmly familiar to me because of that. Jeff Ament is the great bassist and Stone Gossard is a guitarist and co-lyricist. In my opinion Mike McCready is one of the best and most underrated guitarists of his time. Lead singer and songwriter Eddie Vedder has the soul of a poet and vocals that can be melancholy and exhilarating at the same time. Many of his lyrics are infused with references to the ocean (he’s a longtime surfer) and nature, and the need to be alone sometimes, yet always fully present in the lives of loved ones. All the things that feed my soul too.

Photo Pearl Jam

Seeing them perform live in real time has been at the top of my bucket list for as long as I’ve had such a list. I don’t care that they’re well into their fifties now because so am I. For sure I wouldn’t have appreciated it quite as much had I seen them perform onstage at the very start. Can you imagine me getting knocked around in a wild mosh pit? Not likely. I always need the elbow room to dance. Rediscovering their music has once again pulled me out of my head, reminding me that things will eventually be okay and sometimes change is out of my control and sometimes it’s controlled only by me.

It was finding Eddie’s background music quote that first got me thinking about the singer-songwriters I loved the most during my youth and still love today. It’s what prompted me to journal those memories and then a little shyly share them in this blog series. All the music throughout my life that has made me want to get up and dance, to sing along, to celebrate, mourn, and weep. Lyrics that have healed my broken heart, filled my soul, and gave me confidence to stand up for myself, to take a sudden turn, and to bravely let go of things that no longer matter.

I could never pick just one of Pearl Jam’s albums as my favourite. I could never pick a most loved book either. For me it’s not just about one story, it’s all the stories I’ve ever read, the entire library of words and thoughts combined. I can tell you which of their songs have helped to ease more recent worries: Given to Fly, The Fixer, Sirens and I Am Mine. You should listen to them. Better yet, watch them because Pearl Jam always delivers a comfortable feeling onstage of living fully in the moment. I hope they make you feel stronger too.

Below, in no particular year order, are Youtube links to favourite performances, along with my thoughts and some interesting song facts I’ve uncovered. I’ve already shared my feelings about “Long Road” in my previous post titled Love and Loss in the 90s. That song belongs to my mother’s memory. These belong to me. The performances are best watched on a laptop or tablet, and, take it from me, their music most thoroughly enjoyed with headphones on. There’s strong emotions in the details.

It’s a wrap for this Background Music blog series. Thanks for joining me on the ride. Perhaps Pearl Jam says it best, “I know I was born and I know that I’ll die, the in between is mine.” ~ I Am Mine.

Given to Fly – One of my favourite performances of this song. Love the energy of the massive crowd in London’s Hyde Park. It’s one of Michael J. Fox’s favourite Pearl Jam songs too. They dedicated it to him and his struggle with Parkinson’s while they performed it during their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Fixer – A good reminder that if something’s old “put a bit of shine on it”.

Sirens – With all the turmoil in the world, hearing this one never fails to calm me.

I Am Mine – “The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied”.

Daughter/It’s OK – This 2018 performance is in their hometown of Seattle, with some changes in lyrics to reflect turbulent times in American politics. I always believe Eddie when he tells me things will be okay. “Daughter” is about a parent’s mishandling/abuse of their child’s learning disability and the lasting effects that can have.

Black – In my opinion, still the most profoundly poetic song about heartbreak ever written and performed.

Release – “Oh, dear dad. Can you see me now? I am myself. Like you somehow.” xo

Alive – The song that made me first sit up and notice them. This early nineties performance was filmed in a British studio that probably took days to recover from all the angst and long hair flying around.

Better Man – A song about settling, not loving honestly. Fun fact: Bradley Cooper modelled his rock star character in the re-make of “A Star is Born” on Eddie Vedder. I knew it when I saw the movie. You’ll see it when you watch this amazing performance in Madison Square Garden.

Oceans – Eddie has said he wrote this love song to his surfboard. It gets me dreaming about walking the beaches in Hawaii again.

Wishlist – The image in my mind created by “I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood” delights me every time because of long ago summer nights spent cruising around with a friend in her brother’s borrowed Camaro.

Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town – Melancholy story about a woman who never left a small town and an old flame who did leave many years ago and by chance comes into her store one day. “Memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.”

Even Flow – A great rock anthem! This video performance of it is absolutely bonkers. Confirmation I wouldn’t have been able to handle their nineties concerts. Band members have said they’ve often feared for Eddie’s life during shows. If you’re interested here’s a video montage of some of his stage climbs and jumps that were captured over the years. Recently I read a funny comment saying that while many musicians were doing heroin, Eddie Vedder must’ve been doing CrossFit training.

Yellow Ledbetter – The lyrics are intentionally incomprehensible to reflect the confusing loss of a brother during the Gulf War and it’s almost impossible to sing along with. In this early version in Mexico the lyrics “I don’t know whether I’m the boxer or the bag” were changed to “I don’t know if my brother is coming home in a box or a bag”. Mike’s guitar solo at the end of the song is always riveting. I love how they all step aside to rest and let him get on with it.

Guaranteed – Oh, this one speaks to me about the need to be on my own sometimes.

Love Boat Captain – “It’s an art to live with pain. Mix the light into grey. Lost nine friends we’ll never know.” Lyrics that include the nine people who were killed when the crowd surged during Pearl Jam’s set in 2000 at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Devastated, Pearl Jam quit after that and Eddie Vedder’s idol Pete Townshend of the Who reached out to him after the tragedy because of similar circumstances that happened to his band in 1979. According to Pete Townshend, “When Roskilde happened, I just sent Eddie a two-word message: ‘Don’t leave.’ And they did stay. And I think it was very important that they did.”

Come Back – Sharing the studio version in order to hear the beautiful lyrics more clearly. I can’t get through it without getting choked up.

The Waiting – I’m including this duet with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers because I’m a longtime fan and it makes me very happy. Eddie’s “Long Way” from his new solo album Earthling is a tribute to Tom Petty’s style of songwriting. I sensed that the first time I heard it, so I wasn’t surprised when he confirmed the inspiration behind the song and many others on the fabulous album during a recently filmed conversation with Bruce Springsteen.

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 II

Sue

The Early 80s : Forever Young

“Dearly Beloved, We are gathered here today, To get through this thing called Life.”

~ Prince “Let’s Go Crazy”

I mentioned in my previous post Background Music Part One that it was great fun to be a kid in the 1970s. To be in your late teens and early twenties at the start of the 80s, and to be in love with music and dancing, well, it was a whole other level of fun. It was totally rad! That window of time right after high school graduation is both exhilarating and frightening: What do I want to do with this thing called Life? I attended one school from grades eight to twelve where I gathered a very close network of friends and left with a small peer-voted scholarship for the many years I dedicated to writing articles for our school newspaper. It seemed most everyone but me was convinced I was going to be an investigative journalist, setting the world on fire (or at least our community) with truth, integrity, and flowery prose by way of my electric typewriter that I named “Dylan” in homage to both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. Just recently I learned that Bob Dylan named himself after the poet. Now I’m wondering if perhaps I already knew that. No matter, I still carry deep feelings about their individual writings.

Big love for the two Dylans. Fun fact: my mom ran a leather goods shop during my youth and I think of her when I catch the scent of leather. Couldn’t resist a candle that smells like leather bound books.

My graduating class picked up diplomas and our freedom in the school gymnasium to the wistful “Time” by The Alan Parsons Project drifting in the background. While I struggled to figure out which college classes I should take to become an important writer, my mature parents were already at the age where they were talking about taking early retirement from their jobs. They were around the age I am now, which in my mind meant they were really old (longtime grandparents, for crying out loud!) and completely out of touch with what it meant to be young and idealistic. Never mind that on the brink of eighteen my dad enlisted in the RAF and headed off to years of war. This was all about me. So what if I was the last bird to leave the nest? I was eighteen and nowhere near ready to soar! Hell no, I didn’t want to make writing a nice hobby. I certainly did not want to find a “good secretarial job” in order to support myself, just so they could finally retire and leave for parts unknown. So I lived at home, worked a part-time job, and attended a local college full-time, while my parents begrudgingly stayed put and held on to their jobs for a couple more years.

Two of my high school girlfriends attended a different college that was a little further away from where we grew up. Together they decided to rent an apartment that was close to their campus. It was a dump, but a glorious dump because it signified freedom from parental interference. The building was ancient and three-stories high with about eighteen units in total. Their one-bedroom top-floor no-elevator apartment was fairly spacious and we turned it into the best damn hangout in the whole world. There was a narrow hallway from the front door to the main living area. The first thing we pinned to that dingy hallway wall was a floor to ceiling black and white poster of James Dean with his finger pointing in the direction of the living room because that’s where all the fun began. Here it is –and it’s how much now? One more thing we should have hung onto instead of just the memories. But, oh, those memories.


Big hair, big dreams. I still love polka dots!
Some snapshots from the early 80s taken with a poor quality camera of high quality fashion.
I see now that I inherited my love of houseplants from my parents. Suntanning on the hoods of cars while blasting music was “a thing” back then…but on a mountaintop parking lot Après Ski? Crazy girls!
(Yes, that’s me striking a pose on some dad’s poor old car)

MTV had just made its debut and for the first time we could actually see our favourite musicians instead of listening to them on the radio. There they were as if playing live in the living room, lip-syncing their lyrics, dancing provocatively, and acting out random movie-like scenes that often made little or no sense. Still. There they were! And there we were in that crummy apartment with MTV on in the background, dancing and singing and rightfully earning thumps on the walls from irritated neighbours. Saturday nights were for boyfriends or restaurant jobs, but Friday nights, at least in the beginning, were reserved for our highly sacred girls-only sleepovers. We’d show up to the apartment, anywhere from three to six of us, with bulging overnight totes, sleeping bags, and just enough pooled ingredients to make dinner and to inexpertly mix terrible drinks like Screwdrivers or the cheapest rum available to water down with ice and Coke. We thought we were so grown up and sophisticated. Ha!

We danced along to the Go-Go’s and sang our hearts out to Queen and Journey. Sometimes we’d make it a theme night and wear the clothing to best represent it. I remember two of those themes: come dressed as the first place you want to travel to when you have some money and your favourite song today. In the middle of winter I wore a flowered shirt, shorts and a plastic lei to the first party and to the latter a thrifted cat-print dress made out of faux fur and black pointy ears because “Stray Cat Strut” was my rockabilly jam that week.

Eventually things changed, as they always do. Some of the girls began making plans to marry their high school or college boyfriends, while a few more, like me, broke up with ours. The singles quickly grew bored seeing new stacks of wedding magazines every Friday night, so we’d leave the almost-newlyweds to walk several blocks to a college area night club. We just wanted to be young and dance the night away to really great music. I couldn’t imagine myself settling into marriage so soon because I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be. I’d seen my older siblings shoulder some pretty heavy responsibilities with wildly varying outcomes. The odds already seemed stacked against me, even while the expectation for most young women then was to figure it all out quickly and smartly. We grew up hearing we could have it all if we worked hard enough and made the right decisions. Problem was, my young adult life felt more like a multiple choice magazine quiz and the circled answer was always D: none of the above.

If I couldn’t afford to buy a drink I’d volunteer to drive us to the college night club in my first car that someone named the “Blue Bomb”. I think I was one of the first to have my own car. Most of the girls were still driving their parents’ vehicles. Mine was an early 1970s Datsun that I bought with graduation gift-money ($1,000 cash; it pays to have a large family) from a friend’s elderly neighbour, who was probably in her sixties. Everyone recognized that car for a few reasons: it was ugly, it was an electric shade of blue, and a bright yellow and black bumble bee stuffy hung on the rearview mirror, gifted to me by those same girlfriends who called me Sue Bee throughout high school to distinguish me from all the other Susans in our classes.

The highly visible Blue Bomb became a dilemma for us single girls. If we took it out then so-and-so (usually someone’s ex-boyfriend or annoying sibling) could easily spot it in the parking lot and come find us. I’d try to park my car as far away as walking in heels would allow. Inevitably we’d return to find a note stuck under a windshield wiper. Usually it was from other friends telling us which Denny’s to meet them for a one a.m. coffee or fries. One time there was a long, rambling (nobody recognized the handwriting) love letter to me from an anonymous writer that was stuffed inside a bouquet of pink carnations. I had no idea who left it on my car and, honestly, right then I couldn’t have cared less. However, my friends were convinced I had a stalker or maybe a romantic secret admirer, who knew me well enough to know I loved carnations. My argument was who doesn’t love them? Dying of curiosity, they hatched all sorts of ridiculous maneuvers called “operation flower boy” to flush him out of hiding. The plan only resulted in a bad case of road rash for one friend when she tripped while chasing down an innocent, and probably terrified, teenage boy out walking his dog, who made the mistake of stopping to tie his sneaker right next to my car.

The mystery was never solved and the ridiculousness ended there, thankfully. I didn’t receive another love letter or more pink carnations until I met my future husband, but that’s a story for later in the 80s. And no, he wasn’t the mysterious flower boy, although that would be the perfect meet-cute in a rom-com. Speaking of cute, while on our first date we discovered that we went to neighbouring high schools and moved in similar social circles. It’s even likely we were in the same local clubs at the same time. There weren’t many back then and they were always overcrowded with twenty-somethings. He was more likely shooting pool and causing trouble while I was trying to Moonwalk, which probably explains why we didn’t meet-cute off the dance floor until five years later.

When it wasn’t in the shop for repairs, the Blue Bomb kept motoring along, and was often spotted at local beaches, windows rolled down with the one and only Prince blasting, while we girls suntanned on the blazing hot hoods of our cars instead of more sensibly on beach towels in the sand like everyone else. At that moment in time I wasn’t interested in serious dating or anything that got in the way of weekend dance parties. I was like Cyndi Lauper in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, kicking up my heels in party dresses with big costume jewelry earrings. The original video for your viewing pleasure, in case you haven’t seen it. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album was also huge and guys started putting in a little more effort to woo the ladies by dressing up in oversized two-button pastel blazers with shoulder pads and baggy pleated trousers. As much as I liked to dress up, for some reason it was always the witty, untidy boys who first caught my eye. If my young life was an 80s John Hughes film, then it would co-star messy Judd Nelson instead of preppy Emilio Estevez with a soundtrack by Queen or Joan Jett because according to me and Billy Joel, “new phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways…It’s still rock and roll to me.“

A couple of years into the 80s, I’d finally saved enough money to take that longed for spring break vacation to Hawaii. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more. Aloha! The Hawaiian-themed dance parties were for real this time. I spent days walking on sunshine and nights dancing in the dark. I cut my long, layered hair to look like Olivia Newton-John in her “Physical” years, only minus the headband because I just wasn’t the sporty type. Upon my short-haired, suntanned return, my parents announced they were giving me six months to get my life in order so they could retire and move far away. That moment was the metaphorical needle scratching across the record for me. In their defence they’d already given me more than enough time to get on track and I can see how they thought I was wasting most of it. Still, it wasn’t the way I saw it then. I felt ambushed. My bank account was now down to single digits thanks to the vacation and there was barely enough time to build it back up. The Blue Bomb had to be traded for a newer, more reliable sedan with a hefty parental co-signed bank loan. I put college classes on an indefinite hiatus and I went in search of full-time work, which ended up being the dreaded “good secretarial job” that I hated with the same driving force that Aqua Net hairspray was to big hair.

I searched for weeks to find an apartment I could barely afford on my own while also having to make monthly car payments. I collected cast-off dishes and furniture from family members and newlywed friends, and for the first time in my life I was about to live alone. I wouldn’t admit, least of all to myself, that I was terrified about this big life change. Still, I was going to prove that I could make it on my own and I didn’t need anyone’s help doing it. Hand me an ultimatum and I’ll respond by digging in my heels wherever I land. I’ve always been too stubborn for my own good.

Hit the pause button for now–the late 80s years are coming soon!

Below are Youtube links to the songs or music videos mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. Feeling groovy? Check out my previous post Background Music Part One: the 60s and 70s.

Let’s Go Crazy – Prince

Forever Young – Bob Dylan

Time – The Alan Parsons Project

Our Lips Are Sealed – The Go-Go’s (The best video for early 80s young women style!)

We Got The Beat – The Go-Go’s

Under Pressure – David Bowie & Queen

Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey

Tainted Love – Soft Cell

Stray Cat Strut – Stray Cats

Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant

Girls Just Want to Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper

Billie Jean – Michael Jackson

I Love Rock N’ Roll – Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Billy Joel

Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves

Dancing in the Dark – Bruce Springsteen

Physical – Olivia Newton-John

Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds (The Breakfast Club movie version)