Bad Music and Good Memories

Jay and Peaches picked us up for the REO Speedwagon concert in Jay’s parents' Chevy something or other.  Marilyn begged me to go along, knowing full well that I hated REO Speedwagon with every Grateful Dead loving bone in my body.  I knew this was going to be torture but she and I were best friends and she was hoping Peaches and I would hit it off so we could all double-date in the future. His passion for REO Speedwagon already put him at a HUGE disadvantage for that scenario. It also didn't help that he preferred polo shirts and acid washed jeans to concert t-shirts and regular old blue jeans. My high school dream date played love songs on guitar, read books by Kurt Vonnegut and preferred biking to football. As I slipped into the backseat with Peaches, I knew it was going to be a very, very long night.

       Jay was captain of the football, baseball and wrestling teams at the boy’s boarding school down the road from where we lived. Although he boarded at the school, he was from Athol (actual name of a town) and was attending Deerfield Academy on a scholarship and unlike most of the other boys there, he was not a Mayflower descendant. He adored Marilyn and followed her around like a gorilla-sized puppy.

Peaches (what the hell was his real name anyway?) was way more interested in drinking the whiskey he sneaked into the Springfield Civic Center than trying to strike up any conversation with me. He and Jay danced and sang along to every song, pumping their triumphant fists into the air. By the end of the night, Peaches and Marilyn had polished off the whiskey and Jay and I helped them out to the car.

Interstate 91 follows the Connecticut River from New Haven, Connecticut through western Massachusetts, into Vermont and New Hampshire and continues all the way to the Canadian border. Drunk Peaches had sprawled out across the backseat so I squeezed into the front next to Marilyn and leaned my head against the passenger side window for the 30 minute drive back to South Deerfield. Peaches let out an occasional mumble or inebriated exclamation about how awesome the concert was from the back. The dark car filled with Marilyn and Peaches’ whiskey infused sweat as we made our way out of the crowded parking garage.

“And I'm gonna keep on lovin youuuuuuu

Cause it's the only thing I wanna doooooooo

I don't wanna sleep

I just wanna keep on lovin youuuuuu!”

We had just passed by the new Ingleside Mall in Holyoke when Marilyn leaned over to open my window a little more and in the span of seconds my brand new purple jumpsuit felt warm and wet -her whiskey scented dinner suddenly covered my lap.

        “I feel much better now.” She calmly reported.

I don’t remember if I screamed or jumped up in my seat but we did pull off the highway and I tried to scrape the goop off my pants with the scraps of paper we found in Jay’s car. Marilyn wiped a scant stream of barfy spittle that ran along her face into her golden mane of hair. She was beautiful even with barf on her face.

      I walked Marilyn into her dark, wood paneled house past her sleeping parents and got her settled into her room before walking across the cornfield to my house. I decided it was more prudent to go in from my garage so I could slip into the laundry room and rinse off my barf soaked clothes before anyone could lecture me.

Our friendship endured the barf test as well as many other Marilyn inspired antics. She was fearless and constantly dared me out of my introvert comfort zone.  Although we had only become friends the summer after my sophomore year in high school, it was as if we had been best friends our whole childhood.

Marilyn was so eager to leave our small town that she graduated a year early with my class in 1981. She gaily skipped off to RISD where she studied painting and glass blowing.

After high school we rarely saw each other as she was determined never to return to South Deerfield and I shared her sentiment. She spent one summer on Cape Cod working in a tourist shop and then left the East Coast entirely after her sophomore year to work in the glassblowing community in Seattle. She visited me with her boyfriend Preston Singletary during the summer of 1984 when I worked in Boston and again in 1985 when I lived in San Francisco. Once she married Australian artist Andrew Antoniou around 1990 the Pacific Ocean (and lack of money) kept us further apart. I can’t remember precisely the last time we saw each other but I believe it was in 1991 when I was living in Oakland and she and Andrew came to visit the Bay Area. After I moved to the Midwest, time and distance created a bigger gap in our communication, not to mention the three children I was busy attending to daily but we continued to write long letters a few times a year.  When email finally became the preferred method of communicating we felt even closer. Early in 2009, I tried to convince her to join this new thing called Facebook so we could peer into each other’s lives more easily. One of her last emails to me apologized for not figuring out Facebook but that she was battling ovarian cancer and wanted to focus on healing. We reminisced about our epic cooking sessions at her house when were teenagers creating entire gourmet meals to be enjoyed only by the two of us using her family’s fine china at their big dining room table, all the while serenaded by Heart or Iggy Pop from the stereo in their den.

My children never got to meet my best friend but they have heard all of the stories. I always credit her with rescuing me from teenage angst and keeping me sane. She dragged me out of my shyness and forced me to confront those fears and for that I am grateful. 

Marilyn left this world on November 11, 2009.

Being 13 Again!

     Worried about feeling old? Guess what?  If you have not already gone through menopause, then you have something to look forward to! You may be honored with the experience of living out those darkest days of adolescence all over again. This bonus adolescence is extra special because it is enhanced by the addition of wrinkles, gray hair, stretch marks, forgetfulness and some belly fat that just will not go away no matter how much you exercise. Doesn’t that sound like so much fun?  You get to be 13 all over again! You thought you were missing your youth and then it comes back to visit you. Women are so lucky. Forget about the whole  business of  those child bearing years coming to an end, you get to be sad and happy and sad and happy all in the span of 10 minutes. This bonus adolescence might even last longer than your first one if you are extremely fortunate. You can be 13 again and again for like 5 years. Getting old is so much fun! 

     Remember when you were in 7^th grade math class and you thought you could get your period at any minute and since you were wearing tight white pants and the teacher didn’t let students leave to use the bathroom, you would most likely start gushing blood all over the place? Menopause is just like that only maybe without the watermelon lip smacker in your back pocket.  Those final menstruation years are full of surprise appearances. That aging uterus is having its own fire sale in there and everything must GO, GO, GO! 

      Were you missing that time when you were going through puberty and suddenly  all of your clothes didn't fit one day because overnight some kind of freakish  internal mechanism expanded your hips and chest? Your new menopause belly and flappy arms were created by that same perverse internal mechanism all these years later. Yay!

     Maybe we will feel better if we sing "How Lovely to be a Woman" from  "Bye Bye Birdie" over and over until this phase passes. Or better yet, let's all form an old lady band and sing some Ramones' tunes. 

“Home is where you wear your hat.”

-Lord John Whorfin / Dr. Emilio Lizardo from

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

I drove my eldest child to the Oakland airport a couple of weeks ago, past the city where she was born, past the exit I used to take back to my Oakland apartment when I returned late at night from trips to Los Angeles, Stockton or Baja, California in the late 80’s with the man who is now my husband. Past the exit I felt the clutch slip on my first car but didn’t know that’s what was happening and thought I was going to die a fiery death.

On this trip to the airport, my eldest and youngest child and I drove past the Oakland Coliseum, which might be called the Oracle Arena because every big arena seems to be named after a business now. This is the same venue where I saw the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan in 1987 and later in 1989 where I viewed the Boston Red Sox play the Oakland A’s and I could not let go of my ingrained childhood loyalty to the Red Sox. The Red Sox lost but the series continued when the A’s faced the San Francisco Giants in the “Battle of the Bay.” There was a little natural disaster called the Loma Prieta earthquake in the middle of all of this rivalry and once all the dust settled and baseball could resume the remaining games were all held at the Oakland Coliseum.

This Oakland airport is the same place I sat crying into a payphone when “People’s Express” cancelled my flight to Massachusetts in June of 1985. It’s there where I learned about credit cards, business bankruptcy and reading the fine print.

After my eldest daughter effortlessly waved goodbye and disappeared into the airport last month, my youngest child and I drove past the exit that once had a view of giant homes and 1970’s era dark brown cedar shake apartment buildings which appeared to hang precariously onto the hillside over the Walnut Creek tunnel until they were consumed by the Oakland Hills fire in late 1991 when I was 7 months pregnant.

I almost never think about the Loma Prieta Earthquake or the Oakland hills fire from my Minnesota home. I also never have these visceral memories of California while driving around the streets of St Paul where I am more likely to remember the winter my second child was born and I barely left the house because it was so cold and icy outside.

All of these stream of consciousness memories flood my brain on this one 25 minute trip to the Oakland airport with my oldest and youngest child in the car with me. The oldest, who I carried in a front baby pack, bundled under my oversized vintage overcoat when she was colicky for her first 8 weeks of life. She and I walked up and down College Avenue in Oakland where her inconsolable wails were drowned out by the buses, cars and BART trains. We walked every night to spare the neighbors in our small apartment building the incessant crying.

I have lived in Minnesota for 20 years and in the same house for 14. That is the longest I have ever lived in one house or even in one state for my entire 51 years. Two of my three children were born in Minnesota and my youngest has only ever lived in one house, except for the two semesters we spent in California for my husband’s sabbatical in 2001 and now in 2015. I consider myself fortunate to have called so many places home because each time I visit one of those homes I see some street sign or shop or hillside that draws out a memory from my aging brain that I forgot was in there.