First, let me say that I think the iPod is the greatest invention since peanut butter. I listen to mine everyday, especially late at night when i'm working on the computer. I listen at work 1) when the funky lady in the next cubicell starts jamming and 2) when I think that I simply can't stay awake one more minute.
I have 237 GB of songs loaded, and a lot more still available. But that 2377 GB is filled with an wild variety of songs that range from "Mack the Knife," to miscellaneous Andrew Lloyd Webber to Nina Simone to Kate Bush to 9 Inch Nails to Bill Monroe to a bizarre but hilarious song called "I'm the Only Gay Eskimo in My Tribe" by a group called Corky and the Juice Pigs.
Most amazing, to me, are the songs that form the soundtrack of the egocentric little farce called My Life. Songs that call up in stunning detail a place, a time, a person, an emotion, in a way that nothing else can do. Call it a musical flashback that comes zooming out of the past and -- if the memory is powerful enough -- can knock you on your ass.
Start with "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night. Most people refer to is as "Jeremiah was a Bullfrog." It came out in 1971, when I was eight years old and in the second grade. It is one of the very first Top Forty songs i can remember falling in love with. (Interesting factoid: the song was written by Hoyt Axton and TDN didn't really want to record it, but they needed a final cut for an album.)
But the memory it recalls is a rather fuzzy one, as memories from second grade tend to be, but even sweeter for it. My dad took me, my sister and some friends down to River Street for a parade (or something). I remember my first BBF Mindy Higgs and I joyfully, no doubt flatly, singing that song, probably until my dad begged us to stop.
My dad is alive in music for me. He and his cousins had a band in high school called The Hep Cats. Giggle. As time moved on, his tastes turned to folk rock -- Peter, Paul and Mary; the Kingston Trio and Bob Dylan. At family gatherings, he and those same cousins would sing "Lemon Tree," "Tom Dooley" and "Four Strong Winds." He played guitar and sang "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" at my birthday parties. I have an old recording of Dad and cousin Roger singing some of these songs, but it's quality is so terrible that it's painful to listen to. I listen anyway, because the music and the photos which chronicle my life are all I have left of him.
The song that started my relationship with radio was Paper Lace's "The Night Chicago Died." (If I had realized that Paper Lace had recorded "Billy, Don't Be A Hero" I might have boycotted it.) I heard it on some television show and loved it so much I started cruising up and down the radio dial looking for it, until Christmas when I got the 45 from Santa. That was 1974, when I was eleven.
I am not going to talk about Donny Osmond or Bobby Sherman here. Almost any woman of my generation would recount amazingly similar memories of swooning, shrieking, reading Tiger Beat and kissing lunch boxes.
I am also going to skip my rather embarrassing infatuation with Barry Manilow, and recall instead
Elton John's Greatest Hits as the first truly grown-up album I ever bought; followed by
Some Girls from the Rolling Stones -- which I bought mostly because I heard there was a song on it too dirty to played on the radio.
Then there's ABBA, which was cool, then dorky and now kitchy-cool again. And ABBA belongs to Sammy Adams. Around sixth or seventh grade, Sammy told me he'd had a dream in which he and I and Robert and Denise actually WERE ABBA. I thought it was cool that I'd been in someone's dream. Particularly Sammy's.
(Flash forward to freshman year in college, and losing my virginity while ABBA crooned in the background -- a song called "Andante, Andante," which i have NOT got in my ABBA collection. Not out of bad memories, but just because I now think it's a stupid sappy song. Not that "Waterloo" is a particular masterpiece, but it is bouncy and mindlessly happy.)
Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" also brings back high school, playing that song at the Halloween party our class had at Mrs. Moore's parents place, the Savannah Seamen's Home.
But a song that always knocks me out with memory is "Superstar" by the Carpenters.
I know that Bette Midler did a 'hipper' version, but i always preferred the Carpenters. I fell in love with their Singles double album (I can see the brown cover) -- at a slumber party at Ann Gooding's house. Or was it Cindy Banks? I remember getting that album for my very own for Christmas later that year, and being so happy to have it.
But neither of those memories are the one that come first when I hear that song. No, it's Sammy that comes back so clearly, and the bittersweet sadness of Karen Carpenter's voice captures my own emotions of this particular memory so perfectly.
Graduation night in 1981 was, for me, a miserable disappointment, clouded by my growing panic about leaving high school. Not that high school was particularly great for me. It was a hellish ordeal of insecurity, self-doubt, embarrassment, fear of embarrassment, loathing myself for not being popular enough or thin enough or pretty enough. It would take me years to realize no one in high school ever thinks they are popular enough or pretty enough or smart enough or just plain enough. I was such a ninny back then, and deeply, passionately concerned that I had never had a real boyfriend, or a first kiss, at 18. But high school was my world, a known quantity, a place in which I knew, at least, in which niche i belonged. (The good girl, the smart girl, the quiet girl, the best "drawer.") The great unknown of college -- which would take me away from home for the first time -- yawned like a friendless, black and bottomless cavern before me.
My depression that night was compounded by the fallout of the night before. The Beowulf Society had gone out to River Street with the intention of getting drunk, something I'd never done before outside of our Senior Trip in the Bahamas. Getting drunk was a goal for which we strove with a ridiculous innocence and naivete. Denise and I drank pina coladas, for God's sake.
What's the Beowulf Society, you might wonder? It was what we called ourselves, the private in-joke of the little troupe of nerds I hung out with, mostly because we always ended up in the same classes, being the "smart" kids, and worked on the student government together, the newspaper, and were all on various literary teams that went on trips to Macon every year.
Anyway, we had gone down to River Street, the center of Savannah's nightlife, and managed to get served at the Dodge City Saloon. They did card us, but when Robert told them with ludicrous gravity that we'd left our IDs in the car, they shrugged and served us anyway. Oh, for the good old days.
But somehow, even on pina coladas, i managed to get drunk. And i committed the single stupidest, most horrible mistake of my young life up to that point. And it's probably still in the top five of lifetime stupid, horrible mistakes. Possibly the one thing I'd like to erase from my memory completely.
I kissed Robert.
I'd had a love/hate relationship with Robert since seventh grade, when I briefly had a crush on him, and he "went with" me and my friend Cindy both. "Going with" for us at that time consisted mainly of exchanging valentine's and sitting together at lunch.
The "hate" part of the relationship came from the fact that Robert was deeply competitive in nearly every way. And in his own personal hell of trying to fit in, he was frequently enormously annoying, sometimes outright pompous.
I also loathed Robert because he asked me out. How dare he.
I only had four dates in high school. Robert; Chuck, the son of my english teacher, who put him up to it; Fred, whom I knew from church and asked to a dance myself, but viewed with a sort of sisterly detachment; and Bill, an upperclassman whom I adored in a kind of groupie way. I've never really understood why Bill asked me out, but our first date remains to this day the most fun I ever had on a date. He cooked dinner for me at his house and then we went to the Nutcracker. It was also the first time I ever saw that ballet -- or any ballet --and I was mesmerized.
But Robert.... Robert was the target of a great deal of snickering from the "popular" kids in our class. Every social blunder Robert ever made, they found hilarious and another reason to hold him in contempt. I resented him for blithely ignoring that contempt back then. Now I realize it took a bizarre sort of moral courage.
And because i was young and stupid and dying to be accepted, so keenly attuned to being outside the popular circle, I resented Robert for making me so conspicuously "uncool" by asking me out. And I hated myself for being so desperate to go out with ANYBODY that I accepted. Having gone out with Robert, none of the other boys would ever, ever ask me out. (As if that was the only reason. Chalk it up to the desperation of a teenager.)
I kissed Robert only because he happened to be there. He drove me home that night, and I refused to go into the house until i had a goodnight kiss. Little did I know how totally I panicked him with my drunken overture. I only knew that I was keenly distressed by my apparent lack of attraction to the opposite sex.
So I suffered through Graduation day and the consequent festivities of Grad Night feeling such acute embarrassment that I would have welcomed meningitis, an emergency appendectomy, a brain embolism-- anything to avoid having to face Robert and anybody who might have heard what I'd done.
All this was made more excrutiating by the fact that I had a hopeless crush on Sammy. I had had a crush on him ever since Jennifer Fredrich's birthday pool party, where we sat alone on the dock for some time, talking about music, mostly. I had no real expectation or hope of ever having that affection requited, but still, i harbored it. The one time I might have fessed up to this infatuation was on our senior trip. My first night of inhibited drunkeness, I got back to my room in time for curfew, and kept calling the room Sammy shared with Robert and Jonathan. I kept asking to talk to Sammy, but Robert -- always Robert! -- kept talking to me and wouldn't pass the phone to Sammy.
My friend Sonia had a crush on Sammy, too. And i played cupid for her with a generous loyalty born mostly of my own belief that i didn't matter whether I liked Sammy "that way" or not, so he might as well go out with someone I liked. That way I could sort of date him vicariously. He had already spent most of senior year dating a cute little blonde freshman, and had already expressed an interest in Sonia. Sonia was prettier than i was, bubbily and fun and hung out a lot with the popular crowd. I couldn't possibly compete.
And Robert... well, it seemed that he was always getting in the way of any progress I might have made with Sammy. That first dance in eighth or ninth grade? I had found out later that Sammy had mentioned asking me, but Robert had been the one to suggest he ask my friend Ann while he asked me, and that we could double date. When i could spend time with Sammy, Robert was always there too. That whole time on the senior trip, Robert stuck to me like glue. Just about every dance that came around in high school, Robert asked me first, even when i had started steadfastly turning him down. I even went to the homecoming my senior year stag, rather than give any more fuel to even the appearance that Robert and I were an item.
So Grad night was a miserable haze of trying to avoid looking Robert in the eye, and trying to be sympathetic while listening to Sonia obsess about her love life. I don't know, but suspected, that the cool kids were having parties to which I hadn't been invited, or were at least doing something a lot more fun. Worse still, Denise was there with her longtime boyfriend, and even Jonathan was dating someone whom he brought with him that night. More horrifyingly, Robert had apparently told Sammy and Jonathan something about taking me home the night before, because when we all decided to drive down to the beach the first time that night, Sammy turned to Robert and said, "I'm going to ride with Belinda, if that's all right with you."
Of course this prompted a furious seething on my part. When Robert said, "Sure, it's okay with me," i shot back, "Damned right it is." No wonder people thought we were a couple. We fought enough to look like one.
I forget what we did when we got there -- i remember it was foggy and once we got there, we couldn't decide what to do. There wasn't anything to do at the beach at night then. Driving to the beach was more a journey than destination, a reason just to drive somewhere.
We came back to the "senior breakfast." I have a picture of me looking quite sour, holding a napkin on which i'd scribbled "Dodge Sucks" over a fork sticking out of congealed grits, in some kind of makeshift flag.
So, just when i thought the night could get no lower for me, Sammy made me laugh. Sammy could always make me laugh. And when it came time for things to break up, somehow, miraculously, Sammy suggested he, Sonia and I drive back to the beach to watch the sun come up.
And that's when we sang "Superstar" together. In the dark car, lit only by the dashboard's glow, we sang with a total lack of self-concious attempts to be cool.
The sweet sadness of the song resonated in my hopeless puppy love and the sense of impending loss. And yet it was my happiest memory of Grad Night: driving to the beach with Sammy and Sonia in the deep darkness that comes just before dawn, on the eighteen mile stretch of empty two-lane highway through the marsh.
We never did see the sun come up. We realized, too late, that the particular stretch of beach we had chosen was actually facing the wrong way, for Tybee -- or Savannah Beach as everyone called it then -- is a long curving peninsula on the tip of Georgia's coast.
I spent a lot of time talking to Sammy on the phone that summer. Long, rambling, ridiculous conversations about everything and nothing. That Christmas break, he called me up one day to ask if I wanted to drive to Jacksonville with him; he was working for WSGA radio then, and they needed him to go get tickets for the big Michael Jackson concert.
I called in sick to work that day, just so i could go with him. God, we had fun on that drive.
I saw him again after college began. He was at UGA, just an hour from Atlanta where I was, with Denise. Denise and I went to the apartment he shared with another classmate, Craig -- who would be dead in another couple of years, the first death in our class that would shake us all profoundly. We cooked spaghetti, and talked and laughed. I had begun to find some confidence around boys, and flirted shamelessly. And while Sammy talked and joked with me a great deal, he never seemed to get the hint. Or maybe he did and just wasn't interested.
I had a party at my house the following summer. Sammy was there, making me laugh as always. But still, I never found the courage to profess my feelings for him.
I would see him next my senior year in college, when i asked him to be my date at Spring Fling, along with Denise and her current boyfriend. As luck would have it, I was desperately in love with someone else by the time the dance rolled around, and preoccupied. Even so, Sammy was the worst date I ever had. He spent more time talking to my friend Kitty and her boyfriend than me.
I would see Sammy again at Denise's wedding. I had gained a good deal of weight by then, and I was shattered when I overheard him making a comment to someone about me that, yeah, I had "more chins that a chinese phonebook." I slunk home early, and cried myself to sleep, deeply bewildered and hurt that he could be so malicious.
But I still had a thing for him. So much so that the last time we all got together one summer in Savannah -- and I had lost all my weight again, was looking better than I ever had before -- and i had dressed carefully in a lowcut blouse and short skirt with every intention of seducing him.
The evening began well. Sammy and I talked feverishly about writing, and Kerouac in particular. Then something happened. Sammy found that some of his friends were downstairs in the hotel. He said something about going down to talk to them for a few minutes, but that he would be right back....
He never came back. And I haven't seen or spoken to him since.
I wonder how things might have been different if I'd ever told him that I liked him. Possibly even loved him: my first real love that lasted, unconfessed but hopeful, for years. I don't harbor any delusions that we would have had a lasting, lifelong relationship, but still...other choices and relationships in my life would have probably been different, and that would make me slightly different somehow.
And when i hear the Carpenter's "Superstar" -- that sad, sweet song of loss -- I still miss him.
In ripping out the soffit, we found that the utterly stupid way it was constructed would also require a new section of ceiling and side walls that would have to seamlessly flow into the rest of the ceiling and walls. Only after we'd cut the n
ew wallboard did we realize that the old wallboard was 1/8" thicker than the
standard wallboard we'd bought. If you don't think 1/8" is very much, you've never tried to make walls meet with any kind of mutual agreement. 
Next misery came from trying to make the new ceiling texture match the old. This, of course, is impossible. And so the entire ceiling -- now mysteriously expanded to the size of a football field -- had to be redone. More mud and paint to be picked out of my hair. You can see a pic of my ceiling work -- it may not be the Sistine Chapel, but I'm damned proud of the final outcome. Of course, i can still see the seam, but i'm okay as long as i remember to squint slightly whenever I look at it.
