Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
The Leaves
Really, I guess neurologists or psychologists might have some idea, but I mean the question rhetorically. I think.
More accurately, I wonder why some small, seemingly insignificant moments will often over time take on an emotional heft completely out of proportion with their impact or import at the time that they occur. To the point that you recall them with the same sense of fondness or psychic gravity as events like births, weddings, or deaths.
Responses that include use of the term "over-sensitive weirdo" will be disregarded.
One night in Fall 1988 I was driving over to a friend's house when I passed under a cove of trees. At just the right moment a gust of wind came along, blowing a torrent of leaves down onto my car in a thick shower of color. I can still see 'em now, sweeping across the windshield, what seemed like a thousand leaves, swirling crazily, impairing my vision to the point that I nearly had to stop the car. It felt like the Gods Of Autumn were carrying out some weird ordaining, or baptism.
It was, somehow, a really moving little moment. One that has become even more moving in my memory as the years pass. A trick of the brain? Maybe. Probably. I don't give a rat's ass.
It was just one of life’s cool little moments, for whatever
reason. Maybe a reason isn’t necessary. And here’s the thing, even if a reason
is necessary you can make one up. You make things up as you go along in life.
Not everything has to be logical.
Maybe I just needed a signpost, a totemic moment to serve as
a bookend for that moment back in the winter, when I went walking in the snow and looked up at the flakes falling in the orange glow of the streetlight.
The moment with the leaves serves as a convenient reverse-mirror image of that
one.
Those moments were solitary ones. If you are, like me, a
loner-ish, inward-drawn person, maybe it’s easy to understand how those moments
can be so affecting. Thankfully, though, life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the best moments are usually the ones spent with others. Even if you are a
weirdo loner type.
Once, around the same time as the night of the leaves, Emily
and Regina and I spent an afternoon painting with watercolors. It
was November 1st, the day after Halloween. It was gray and cool
outside, leaves everywhere. Max and I had been to Nashville the night before, specifically to go to the record store, where I bought Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece. We listened to it as we painted.
That afternoon was one of the best of my life. Everything was so calm. Each of us was in a laid-back, open frame of mind. There was no melancholy, no
foreboding, no weird undercurrent of insecurity or mistrust. Instead, the mood was one of tranquility, with creativity and quiet joy flowing freely.
We listened to the Van Morrison album twice through. Veedon
Fleece is a strange album, wistful and jazzy/folky
on the surface, perfect for the mood of that afternoon, but beneath that
surface moves a turbulent sea of ever-changing emotions. It’s an album haunted
by memories of Van’s Irish homeland, which is brought to life in vivid green on
the cover. Song after song explores the loneliness and longing of One Irish Rover. “You’re so fragile you just may break and you don’t know who to ask,” he
sings in “Who Was That Masked Man” and you can feel the helplessness in his every breath. “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push The River” is
the title of another key song, and I’m betting even Van doesn’t know what that
really means. But there’s a hint in there, somehow, of movement, of intense
need, testing boundaries, the harsh ceaseless truth of nature.
Sometimes I think the great theme in Van Morrison’s seventies
music is the inevitability of change. Little wonder then, that his music
figured so prominently in my world during this time. Change was a fact of
everyday life. Sometimes a painful one. That’s the way it goes during those
teenage years. And all subsequent years, really. But especially the teenage
ones.
“We stood and watched the river flow,” Van Morrison sings in
“Country Fair”, a song where the sense of stillness, of yearning for something very far away, is so acute that it’s almost physically painful. He finishes the
thought with this: “We were too young to really know”.
Chasing happiness can be a frustrating, disappointing
endeavor. I’m a big believer in the idea that the best moments of life are the
ones you weren’t necessarily looking for. You just get lucky sometimes, and more often than you might think. I also
believe, to a certain extent, that you can create your own luck. So if I could
go back and talk to my seventeen-year-old self I’d try to convince him of the
same thing I’m going to try to tell my forty-plus-year-old self every day from
now on. That is, you need to notice and appreciate more often those things like
the time those leaves fell over your car, no matter how simple it seems, or how
grossly romantic the idea might be.
And you need to set up more days like that time you and Emily
and Regina spent the afternoon painting. Change happens, emotions flare up and subside, give way to other emotions. All of the hurt, the frustration, the
flat-out knocked-on-your-back sadness of that time period lingers on to a certain extent, true, but none of that stuff can stand up to the pure untouched pleasure
of great memories like that one, and that’s fuel for living.
“We were too young to really know.”
Boy, oh boy, were we.
