Last night I was out with some friends at Superfine, one of my favorite restaurants in the whole of Brooklyn, and the jukebox was playing a pretty delightful blend of 80s alternative (remember “alternative?”). I was buzzing along with the conversation and occasionally tuning into the music when all of a sudden I realized the song playing was “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked.
I had forgotten it existed. Completely. Until last night, I probably hadn’t heard it for a decade-and-a-half. But even though I hadn’t listened to it in ages, I found myself nodding my head and singing along to the chorus:
Hey Chel you know it’s kinda funny
Texas always seems so big
But you know you’re in the largest state in the Union
When you’re anchored down in Anchorage
In the singing along, I not only remembered “Anchorage,” I rediscovered it. This is a song about old friends reconnecting and reflecting. When I first heard this song in 1988, I was a thirteen-year-old dreaming of getting out and beyond (I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but it meant something big) and an obsessive letter writer. I think could imagine “Anchorage” as a correspondence I would be having one day, when I was all grown up. Could it be I’m all grown up? Well, weirdly, yes.
Rediscovering it, now, feels like a musical hug from the universe.
I took time out to write to my old friend
I walked across that burning bridge
I mailed my letter off to Dallas but her reply came from Anchorage, Alaska
She said, Hey girl it’s about time you wrote
It’s been over two years, my old friend
Take me back to the days of the foreign telegrams
And the all night rock and rolling
Hey Chel we was wild then
I’ve had so many moments of reconnection the past two years, thanks to the internets. I’m no longer surprised when I get a Facebook invite out of the blue from someone I haven’t talked to in a decade. Rather than feel surprised these days, I mostly just think it’s about time you wrote.
And there’s something reflective and shy in all of our reintroductions. We’re almost always laughing at ourselves even as we’re seriously trying to make something of the words we send into each other’s orbits.
Leroy got a better job so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, he’s started school
I’ve got a brand new eight month old baby girl
I sound like a housewife
Hey Chel, I think I’m a housewife
The bittersweetness of thinking about where we are and where we thought we would be. (Or maybe where we thought everyone else thought we would be?)
Hey girl what’s it like to be in New York?
New York City, imagine that
…
Leroy says send a picture
Leroy says hello
Leroy says keep on rocking, girl
Keep on rocking
(Here I am, in New York City. Did I know that would happen when I was thirteen? Imagine that.)
I came home last night and played the song for E. I dreamed through the chorus, and I’ve been singing it all day.
Keep on rocking, friends.
I’m finally getting past the holidaze and looking forward to a good year ‘o meaningful blogging, but I just had to indulge the impulse to note that I turn the big 35 today. Mid-thirties: whoop!
I’m totally well aware that I’m undercutting their intended irony, but I’m still going to be bopping around singing Timbuk 3 today. I’m wearing sunglasses in January in NYC today, just because it feels right.
This Slate article about Omni magazine reminded me of just how influential that publication was to me as a kid. Along with this 1982 book, The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog, which I used to read and read and re-read, Omni inspired my pre-tween dreams about the future, and helped to offset my anxieties about nuclear war. (I grew up in the shadow of NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain, so I spent a pretty unhealthy chunk of time calculating my survival odds after seeing The Day After on television.) Robots, space vacations, and technological solutions to poverty and inequality: these were the subjects of my dreams about 2010. It’s a year laden with so much sci-fi meaning. This is the year we’re supposed to make contact, yo.
Being a few days away from 2010 feels all sorts of mixed up. Our dreams of the future from twenty years ago just seem really silly now, even as I think many of us are actually pretty disappointed (if not because we don’t have robot housecleaners than because we still – unbelievably – haven’t prioritized finding and implementing solutions to things like poverty and climate change). And yet, this ever-increasing digital world we are living in feels pretty dang amazing. So, at the end of this year, I’m thinking a lot about past-future hopes, present disappointments, and the magic of my lived reality.
Compounding all of this is a general feeling of elation that we’re leaving behind the aughts, or the zips, or the zeroes, or whatever we want to call this last decade. Yes, I know that the new decade won’t officially start until 2011. But I don’t really want to slog through another year of the 2000s. Most people I know don’t really want to, either. (Some of my friends have, in fact, declared the 2000s The Worst Decade Ever, although I don’t feel entitled to make that judgement.) The catalog of horrors feels almost endless: Bush, 9-11, evangelicalism, torture, class divisions, the worsening state of public education, wars on two fronts, the swelling of the prison population, natural disasters exacerbated by climate issues… Blarg, blarg, blarg, and BLARG. When I stood on the National Mall and watched Barack Obama deliver his inaugural speech at the beginning of this year, I experienced as much relief as I did hope. Finally, it seemed, someone had the courage to tell us that there are no good and fast answers to our problems, but that it is our job to undertake the difficult task of making meaningful change, anyway. That commitment is what really gives me hope, after all.
So as much as I don’t have dreams anymore about my life on Saturn (yes, it has rings, so it MUST be the best planet), I also don’t have any illusions that life in this new decade will be that much easier or better. As Buckaroo Banzai, that pivotal figure from the world of early 1980s cult sci-fi said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
So here we are. And it feels good to hit the reset button (even symbolically) and start a new decade (even if it’s not really) and get started with the hard work of reinventing our present and re-imagining our future. I’m elated about this! And I hope you are, too. So let’s make and achieve some big goals, and let’s do some real good in the universe.
Happy New Year, readers and friends!
I’ve been contending with chronic back pain for nearly two years now, and it’s been hard to think of it as anything but a condition, a curse, and a limitation. But as the holidays take hold and I reflect (again) on the many, many blessings of my life, it occurs to me that I’ve recently begun to understand this injury as a kind of gift. Not all the time, and not always happily, of course. But it is a gift, of sorts, from the universe.
Did You Miss Me? by Sam Brown (http://www.explodingdog.com/title/didyoumissme.html)
ok
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?
– ‘Starfish’ by Eleanor Lerman
Whenever I had the occasion to spend Thanksgiving with one particular tribe of my extended family while I was growing up, my great uncle would make us pause during our Thanksgiving meal and share what we were most thankful for that particular year. When I was a kid, this spotlight on my gratitude was both exciting and terrifying. I always wanted to pick exactly the right thing to share, and use exactly the right words to explain why it deserved to be shared. As I got older, this ritual became much easier, even as prioritizing my appreciation remained a challenge. I just spoke from the heart, and stopped worrying whether it was right, or important enough, or even particularly articulate. And this is the way I say thanks these days: from the heart, and sloppy as whatever. I’m grateful for these Thanksgiving moments of terror because they helped me to recognize the abundance of my thankfulness, and to be open to sharing it just as I feel it.
Earlier this year, that same great uncle of mine passed away. When I got the news, I felt marooned in the limited knowledge I had about his life. As I get older, I am overwhelmed by how little I know about my family and friends (even when I know a lot), and how I often don’t realize someone’s influence until I feel his or her absence. I wish – of course, of course – I wish that I had one more time to thank him for his holiday tradition and for every way he impacted me as well as others.
Every year now seems marked by a new notice of our shared mortality, and by more signs to pay attention, to notice it all. I see more meaning, or I make it – I’m not sure which. My family, young and old alike, seem to be aging at an alarming rate. My life is full of friends with Books, Babies, and Big Decisions. It’s really scary sometimes. It becomes more and more clear: we’re all just passing through this life. I’d like to hope this realization prompts us to give more, help more, share more. It’s important for me to say this, to commit to honoring my abundance by helping out and loving as much as I can. To me, there’s no better way to celebrate this life.
So, as imperfect as this is: thank you to my family and friends, to all of you readers who’ve made the time, and to all of you surfers who have wandered here serendipitously.
Thank for you sharing in this life, real and virtual, with me.
We have more adventures together.
