Friday, April 18, 2008

The Bearable Lightness of Memory.

There are stars in the southern sky;
Southward as you go;
There is moonlight and moss in the trees
Down the Seven Bridges Road.

I heard this song tonight as I drove home from my daily chore, and I immediately flashed back to my days as a young man.

In those days, there were "the boys." We didn't actually call ourselves that, but when we went out, we were "the boys." Like, "The Boys Are Back In Town."

And the music references continue......largely because, our lives were surrounded by the music.

There was Karl, and Jim, and Dave, and Ted. And myself. But the greatest of these was Ted.

Ted and I met in high school. More to the point, we just sort of became friends in high school. It was pretty inauspicious, our first meeting; he beaned me in the head with a volleyball. And by head, I mean face. And by volleyball, I mean hard. He didn't draw blood, and he didn't draw anger. He seemed to realize that I pretty much accepted the rebuke, and with our own good natures, we became fast friends.

My entire cranial hard drive that contains my high school memories are filled with Ted, and the rest of the boys. We weren't outcasts. We weren't popular.

Well, Ted was.

I was a theatre geek.

And one of the defining moments of our friendship was when some other guy, a popular guy, asked Ted, "Why do you let Clemo hang around with you?"

Teds reply: "You don't get it. I don't let him hang around with me. He lets me hang around with him."

I was with him when he met the girl of his dreams. We were in a restaurant in Frankenmuth, Michigan....and he remembered that an old girlfriend of his worked at this place. And just as he said it, in she walked. She was our waitress. As she walked away, he said, quite plainly, "I'm going to marry that girl."

And in 1984, he did.

He pretty much did whatever he set his mind to.

But the song.......Dave and Ted and I were driving around one spring evening, much like the evening I'm living through today. The song came on the radio, and we began to sing. Beautiful three part harmony. The kind you feel in the pit of your stomach, reverberating like the last chords of a Beethoven Symphony. In that moment, we were together like nothing else; we were rockstars, balladeers, and we were to be envied, because without even trying, we were locked into a harmony that would remain in our memories for over twenty years.

I'm still in contact with Ted...sporadically. Those ties don't untie. Very few of my ties do. It's a gift and a curse, as Adrian Monk would say. But mostly a gift.

The sun is going down now....and I feel the need to sing. Or hum.

There is a taste of time sweetened honey,
Down the Seven Bridges Road.

1 comment:

Kizz said...

When I hear that song I always think of you singing it in Saginaw. I wish I'd known this story then.