I was driving to work the other morning and was doing my usual despondent flipping around my radio presets. I say "despondent" because so often, so little is worth listening to. There's a rather juvenile yukfest that's on some of those stations, but I have no interest in their snottily partisan bits, their shopworn music playlist, or their affinity for cracking themselves up. Other stations are little better; few seem to realize that some of us just want some really good music without being forced to laugh at toilet jokes or saccharine "rise and shine!" antics. At best, I want something that's as grouchy as I am, or at the very least, I want good music with a minimum of talk. (My vote is often for "grouchy." Bring back Hughes Rudd from the dead. Put him on the radio. That's what I want to wake up to.)
(By the way, I know I could listen to NPR. But in the mornings, I don't want to listen to much talk. Plus, I have all the rest of the day to be immersed in current events. The last thing I really want is to be hit between the eyes with more current events, which invariably means bad news. My response to most things I hear in the news now is a despondent "Oh, man, they wouldn't do that, now, would they?")
But the other morning, I was playing with the presets and caught the last minute or so of "Walkin' on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves (by the way, given what happened a couple decades later, you wish they could go back and tweak what eventually became a doubly-unfortunate name). I mentioned the other day how certain songs bring back certain memories for you. In this case, "Walkin' on Sunshine" makes me think of the first time I met the man who became my beloved. It was the end of the trip, and we'd said our goodbyes earlier that morning. I was sitting aboard a 767, and we were stuck in a protracted ground hold, just idling while the backed-up traffic came in. I was listening to the in-flight audio over those stethoscope-style plastic headphones, and one of Delta's audio channels that month was devoted to music of the 1980s.
Now, let me set this up even further. At the time, I was getting over a broken heart. A month before, I'd had my heart broken when the realization hit me that someone I'd really flipped for didn't feel the same for me; he wanted to just be friends with shared interests. I had a rather heartbroken trip back home, gotten my grief out and all that. Then I decided that, dammit, I'd build a very happy independent life for myself. No guy? No problem. It's just that much more freedom, I decided.
That was the backdrop that Tuesday morning as "Walkin' on Sunshine" came on. I'd been amused by the song because David Letterman used to have it as a campy backing track during the mid-show film segments showing him and Paul Shaffer having a grand day out. This time, though, I half-listened to the lyrics. I remembered the fun I'd had over the previous few days. I thought of how well he and I had gotten along. And suddenly I was experiencing the same thing Janeane Garofalo used to talk about: when an abandoned puppy looks at you with those sad eyes, that same sinking feeling that the life you'd built for yourself is about to be turned upside down because you've opened your heart, and your life, to another creature. "I have a dog now!" (Followed by several expletives.)
So, yeah. I wouldn't trade the last several years for anything, but I still can't hear that song without thinking about my feeling that morning: "I have a boyfriend now!" (Followed by several expletives.)
The kicker: I didn't know it when the trip started, but the draggy feeling and sore throat I had at the beginning of the trip was influenza incubating within me. It erupted two days in, when I woke up with a 101-degree fever. Two days later, I felt better, though I should have bought stock in the parent company of Kleenex. So, as our 767 began its ascent, I laughed as the music channel started playing "Sloop John B." Followed by the theme song from the movie M*A*S*H. (For those of you who don't know, it's a song called "Suicide is Painless.") Now that's a song you really want to hear while you're tens of thousands of feet in the air in a speeding, pressurized tube, no? (And, given the events of the following year aboard two other 767s, really unfortunate.)
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