My parents bought me a car to drive about a year after I got my driver’s license. It wasn’t fancy, a Mustang II with an AM radio and a penchant for leaking oil and breaking down. When my brother got his license, my parents upgraded us to a green ’79 Mustang with tires too big for the wheel wells. They would scrape every time we went over a big bump or a dip. For a period of time, it had no radio. This was more maddening than only being restricted to the AM band, but some good came out of it. Before everyone had their licenses, we all piled in the cars of the few who could drive in order to get from here to there. We were smashed together, chattering all the way, laughing and gossiping. In other cars, music was the background or the foreground of our ride, but in my car we filled the silence ourselves. Driving a dark road to somewhere one night we fell silent until Eric burst into the opening notes of Gun’s and Roses Mr. Brownstone. We were all GnR fans, and knew every word, so we rode into the night, our drug-free bodies singing with great gusto about addition and touring and a life that nearly all of us would never lead.
A while ago, I photographed the house on this lot. I was thinking it was about to be torn down and indeed, it was. Two houses have replaced it, with two more coming soon. Once again, I’m torn between the infill development (which I support) and the fact that the houses built are all very large and they leave no room for a yard.
In my mid-twenties I lived in my version of Shangri-La: a five bedroom house with two bathrooms and four other female roommates. One of my roommates was dating one of our neighbors, a late-20s PhD who spent his days doing some sort of scientific research I didn’t understand. He lived alone, but his younger brother was often over and we saw a lot of the two of them. We called them the James Brothers. His brother, in the fashion of younger brothers the world over, was the hipper, freer James Brother, working in a job I don’t remember, but more importantly, painting his car with chalkboard paint and playing the guitar here and there. He was pretty darn attractive, and even more so when he played his guitar for us in our house. One evening he launched in to the song “Hallelujah” and I knew from the first verse this was a song that needed to become a part of me. After he finished playing and we clapped I made inquires. The younger James brother lent me his Jeff Buckley tape so I could spend the next few weeks rewinding and hitting play. Much like the experience of my twenties, the song is both simple and complex, hopeful and melancholy, wrapping angry words in a poetry that hits an incredible range of emotions. I’ve heard other versions, but I come back to Jeff Buckley,* because the fact that he was a talented artist who died too soon adds yet another layer to what is already a complex and beautiful song.
*Although I shut off the song when he gets to his “general wailing” part at the end.
One summer, I worked the night shift two days per week at a budget motel. There were a lot of “betweens” that summer. I was between colleges and boyfriends, my parents were poised between marriage and divorce and my brother was between residences. I loved and hated the night shift. It was fun being on my own, the only one awake among hundreds of sleeping motel guests. I loved that I was an official “creature of the night”. But it was exhausting, pushing myself all the way to 6:00 a.m., and sleeping during the day was a challenge. There also wasn’t much to do in the middle of the night after all the grumpy traveling families had checked in and were tucked away in their beds, and all the truckers had wandered from their endless conversations in the lobby to their slumber. I listened to cassette tapes to keep me company and every morning at 4:30 I would take a “security walk” around the parking lot. It was really just an excuse to get out of the office before people turned out to complain about the toast bar. By 4:30 the dawn had broken and the clear Boise sky was melting into blue. No matter how tired I was, no matter how boring the night had been, it was always a beautiful morning and I sang this song aloud as I ambled through the lot. Oh what a beautiful day.
ps. Hugh Jackman! He’s the man! He’s rather broad, but you have to picture him much further away from you, up on stage.
Those Boise, Idaho readers know that I loved this Basque Country postcard. For those not in the know, Boise has a pretty strong basque community. The postcard is from Dani, who asks me to send her something. I’ve not yet done so, but I’m not ruling it out.
Here, I have traced my sewing line in disappearing marker so I know where to sew.
