While all of this is going on I'm plugged into my IPOD. Two Goo Goo Dolls songs remind me of some other challenges and beginnings back on Long Island circa 1983/1984 (even though the songs and the band didn't exist back then). The first "Here is Gone", hearkens back to letting go of some personal losses while doing a lot of riding across the 2 lane highways of the North Shore on my Kawasaki KZ750 (sometimes I would get on the Orient Point Ferry during the evening and cross the Sound to Connecticut). Not sure I can really adequately describe those moments; the feel of the leather seat as I'd tap into first gear after kick starting the engine; the dull vibration of the motor reverberating as the wheels unwind on the highway underneath me on an early fall day with the sun setting; the black soft separation from family (a lot of time out at night simply screaming down roads overnight), school friends, and old associations slowly growing and being replaced by the embraced solitude of a semi-rural environment; the realization I was moving on and not going back to my parent's home or the aborted adult life which had crumbled before me, ever. The beginning of a smile that could make the right woman blush. Some stuff sticks in your head (Even now, I still smile, and J, sometimes, still blushes). So, here's a decent YouTube video of "Here is Gone", which, at least for me, creates some neural triggers (you can minimize the advertising embedded in the frame). I usually turn the volume up on this and try to damage my hearing or at least a couple of synapses when listening. It still seems appropriate and I'd probably recommend the same for anybody in similar circumstances (Hell, if you're crossing that type of mental terrain with that little light, would you even want to live forever? Just go and turn the volume up and feel the wind in your hair.).
Click thru the embed (which YouTube has disabled) to the YouTube site for the WB official video and tune.
My favorite set of wheels at rest on the patio where I kept her.
The second tune is "Let Love In". Like this year, 1983 brought a lot of issues to disposition and unfamiliar places to travel through. You find yourself making up a lot of stuff as you go along. At some point in time you hit your stride and realize you'll get to exit another tunnel, at least for that day. Twenty eight years ago I had found my own pace on a tough piece of road, but started to recognize my solitary shadow when J popped up as a medical assistant collecting blood samples at the nuclear power plant I was working at. It starts like this; you walk into some make believe examination room in the back of a tractor trailer and find yourself in front of some medical tech with candy blonde hair, large blue eyes, a kiss of freckles across her upper cheeks and dressed in a short white nurse's dress (from southern California yet). After two years mainly by myself and a lot of time on the road I just stared alot and in the following days found myself trying to hit locations where my eyes could drink things in for just one more time. Lots of stories here, and both of us had enough history that it felt like being released from some decrepit prison where even the guards had lost interest in performing their duties. For now, just a snapshot of an intense late spring/early summer. First, a first kiss at the center of the Brooklyn Bridge ("That's not NYC, I'll show you NYC", in laughing response to her tale of the NYC tourist tour) and today a copy of Roebling's engineering plan for the bridge hangs on our stairwell wall. Second, a memory of my hands slowly encircling her waist following a dinner date during May 1983 and really fighting a desire to let my hands see for me (I mean really fighting that odd mix of "I want you" and "I stopped caring about things some time ago, so why don't we enjoy tonight"; I really liked this girl.). She asked to go home at that point, but something unspoken passed between us that night. It's hard to capture the thousand small gestures, sights and sensations that comprise the start of a relationship. Suffice it to say a mix of forgotten intimacy, desire, talk, and some personal, quiet contentment marked her sojourn and mine as accidental fellow travelers at Shoreham late in the spring of 1983. Six weeks later, with J returning to the left coast, I asked her to marry me and on May 12, 1984 we married on the anniversary of our first meeting in a tractor trailer where I gave up some blood and remembered what it felt like to be a young single man. So here's my emotional memory of that six weeks.
As before, click thru the embed (which YouTube has disabled) to the YouTube site for the WB official video and tune (not as good as the first video, but the lyrics and tune catch the moment right).
And in the fullness of time, a very happy, but tired Mom and Dad posed with their daughter Rachel. And we started down a new road. It was a nice time. I really didn't appreciate it enough at the time.
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