Memory: Freedom ’97
I’m kicking off a new category of posts here. It’s a category of Memories, and while in a way almost everything I post on this blog could be classified as memories, this category will focus on specific recollections I have that strike me and awaken a certain feeling. You know what I’m talking about, where you smell a scent that you remember from your youth, and suddenly a ton of stuff comes flooding back. I just feel compelled to capture those moments all of a sudden. We’ll see how it goes in the months to come…
It’s funny how very specific (and not necessarily remarkable) moments can stick with you. At the time I had no way of knowing that here some 15 years later I’d find myself thinking about that specific day’s mundane commute. It was just a simple drive home from junior college, one of hundreds of identical drives I would make in my early college career. And yet, here I am about to discuss it.
It was the fall of 1997, during my first semester of college. I was returning from a Saturday morning event that my Native American studies class was putting on. It was early afternoon, and I had the top down in my beat-up old Le Baron. It had rained a little earlier, but the sky had cleared leaving crisp fresh air and my favorite kind of weather: sun shining through dark rain clouds, reflecting off wet pavement and illuminating the emerald hills of 680.
The feeling I get when I think about that drive… it really speaks to that time of my life. These were good years for me. Classes were easy, life was simple, responsibilities were few, and the path ahead of me in the immediate future seemed clear. Every day, throwing my backpack in the backseat, putting the top down and driving home in the sun. Cranking Led Zeppelin or Aimee Mann or whatever else I listened to in those days (that is if I wasn’t tuned to Live 105 or Alice@97.3 and tolerating that horrible era of post-grunge, but I digress). To think of just the simplicity, at least in my memory. And the hope and anticipation of it. I was young, absorbing it all, the world laid out in front of me. So much wonder about what that night, that year, college, love, and life might offer. Basking in the simultaneous notions that 1) there was so much I didn’t know and that absolutely anything could happen for me in the future, and that 2) I was somehow invincible and in control of it all. My every swing was a homerun. And I was just biding my time and preparing for some opportunity for greatness that would reveal itself to me soon. The memory is one of freedom. A sense of wonder that I took for granted then, and that as an adult I don’t think I ever got back.
“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”
— Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
Listening to: Billy Bragg – “Volume II”
[amtap amazon:asin=B000HEZ8V0]
