A Moment In Song, Vol. 5: I Stay Away

It’s October of 2020, and I’m 43 years old. This year has been universally agreed upon as the worst in a century, everyone knows it, everyone has felt it. Millions of people are sick, hundreds of thousands dead, most of us have been essentially sequestered in our homes and communities for months. But tonight, a cloudy and muggy Sunday, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier.

I’ve got a pot of crab boil coming to a simmer on the stove, ready for three pounds of snow crab legs that we will steam, crack and disassemble like scavenging animals, and then roughly chop the sweet meat and fold it together with mayonnaise, minced dill, chives and lemon juice. We will toast buttered potato rolls and pile them high with crab salad and feast fearlessly. I already made a red cabbage slaw with cider vinaigrette and a slender orange slices; it’s chilling while the flavors meld and the crunchiness of the cabbage softens. It’s getting dark so early these days. I’m playing my Spotify time capsule, an algorithm-engineered playlist of mostly 90s tunes, and it’s pretty spot on. Candlebox, Bell Biv Devoe, Bangles, each new song brings a smile with the simple pleasure of recognition and nostalgia.

And then, out of nowhere, the opening guitar notes and shuffling drumbeat of I Stay Away by Alice In Chains seize me in a grip of breathtaking momentary clarity. How corny can I be? I am suddenly so clearly in my teenage angsty mind of the first days I would have heard that song, seventeen and such a fool. For just a moment, I am overtaken with the wish to be able to show that girl this moment, the unthinkable peace and gratitude of domestic middle-age. I want to hold that girl’s face to the glass of 26 years and gift her with the vision of the future and whisper reassurances that it will all turn out better than she could ever hope. 

A corny half-forgotten grunge song drops me in the brain of that girl and I know that she could never have imagined this life. My breath leaves me as I see, through overlapping lenses of naïveté and experience, how easy it would have been for me to never end up here. How close I came, over and over, to settling for something else, how effortless it would have been for me to have accepted a reality that would have led me down a path of discontent or misery or just otherness. How many men I almost attached myself to who would never (never, not for a minute) have brought me a moment of the joy and ease that I have with Austin. I may have been prettier back then, and definitely skinnier, but I wouldn’t trade an hour with seventeen-year-old me. Our house is never very clean, and our cats never let us sleep in, and I haven’t seen my coworkers in person in half a year. Even in the midst of pandemic, even trapped across the country from my family in a red state teeming with conflict and ignorance, even as winter looms with no end to the chaos of America and the planet earth at the dawn of a new decade, I am so grateful.

Dear Delaney of 1994: You won’t recognize a single thing about your future, especially yourself, but I promise, I promise, you’re gonna love it.

A Moment in Song, v. 4

Sure, some songs are going to always take you back to the first time you heard them, or that summer they were ubiquitous (see previous Moment in Song posts...). But sometimes, if you're really lucky, a song you loved for old reasons gets repurposed into a song you love for all time.

Back on the Chain Gang, The Pretenders:

This song originally took me to a sad old place. I first learned The Pretenders with Brandes, we had the Best Of CD so he could learn "Brass in Pocket" as a cover song for his band. There are very few low points in the Pretenders best-of catalog, and certainly the highlight is "Back on the Chain Gang." On the Pretenders episode of Unplugged, she says she cribbed the song from "Working in a Coal Mine," and if you hear her tell it, it makes sense. I mean, is Chryssie Hynde the coolest woman on earth? She might be. Tracy and I saw them at the Ryman a few years back, and Chrissie was in white leather pants. She was like fifty-five. Truly a rock star.

After Brandes and I split, before things were easier between us, I saw Guilty Pleasures play "Back on the Chain Gang" (Kat sang it, of course). Suddenly that line came to life for me: "I found a picture of you, those were the happiest days of my life." At that time, it was a punch to my gut. I'd just packed up our formerly shared home and stored boxes of pictures, what do you do with all the pictures after it all goes to hell? I still come across them, and am shocked by how young we were. And maybe in the fall of 2002, I heard the song and the past would have seemed like the happiest days of my life. Certainly not the present, and the future was not just foggy but blank.

That was eight years ago. Longer than we were together. And as these years scroll onward, I'm glad he is my friend, and glad he is not my husband (he shares these sentiments). It certainly seemed like it at the time, but those weren't the happiest days of my life. The happiest days are everywhere, they aren't crammed into the good times of a seven-year relationship. We certainly were happy, sometimes, just as we were sometimes contentious, and sometimes deceitful, and sometimes selfish, and sometimes just fools.

Fast-forward to May 2010, the month I marry the man I didn't know existed way back then. It's Wedding Week, and it's a blur, although not so much a frantic one as a smiling one. The day before the wedding, we've got a crew of helpers coming to the venue to set up tables and chairs, put out the plates, hang decorations. I spend the morning running errands with my sisters: mani-pedis, a quick lunch and then we head to Sylvan Park to pick up the flowers for our bouquets. There are plenty of people I will be glad to see and spend time with over the weekend, but just for these few hours, I'm so, so happy that it's just me and my sisters, how it's always been. I'm driving us around, and the car is chock full of party paraphernalia. As we're riding down Murphy Road, "Back on the Chain Gang" comes on the radio, and we take a break from the constant flow of conversation that has always existed in our three-sided circle, and we sing along at the top of our lungs, "Those were the happiest days of my life..."

P.S. I've spent this week going back through the history of this blog adding tags. Now, if you want to browse through all the food-related posts (don't worry, there's a lot of them), you can do that here. Or if you're wanting to start at the beginning of the Wedding Story, now that's easy! Was that the best use of my spare time this week? Nope. Am I glad it's done? I am.

Moment in Song, Vol 2

MamaSnee complains tonight about two songs that have been getting stuck in her head. Thank you, MamaSnee, for giving me something to talk about when it's getting way too late to have not blogged today:

1. Fly by Sugar Ray. I don't know why this song enters my head, particularly as often as it does. Maybe when I'm thinking about something I do "every morning" and then it goes haywire? I don't know. I hate that I know every word to songs like this just because of the quality of radio programming in West Tennessee in the late 90s.

2. Strangers in the Night (instrumental version). This is the song that my brain turns to when it's in neutral. "Doo-bee doobee dooo...." if you can hear what I'm trying to say. I don't whistle the way some people do. I CAN whistle, I just...don't. Some people whistle when a song is in their head, or when they are zoning out. I sing, to myself, "Doo-bee doobee doo....exchanging glances..."

3. Some other lame late 90s song that turns into Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio when I'm singing it to myself. See, the whole point of this post was that when I get one specific song in my head, another unwelcome one like Sugar Ray (Sublime? Smashmouth? Something like that...) at some point I realize I've stopped singing that song and started singing, "...cause I ain't never crossed a man that didn't deserve it..." I can't tell you why, even when I can remember what the first song is. Damn, this has turned into a terrible story. (**EDITED to add: I remembered! It's What I Got which is indeed by Sublime. Here is what happens: I don't cry when my dog runs away. I don't get angry at the bills I have to pay. I don't get something when my mom smokes pot, skips the bottle and goes right to the rock... (which THEN morphs into "Revival" by Me Phi Me off the Reality Bites soundtrack)... Here me now the waves are splashing, love is laughing... and THEN into Gangsta's Paradise. Seriously.)

I also, sometimes, get bits of my Dad's songs in my head. Songs he hasn't sung for years, like Fool's Gold or Do You Ever Even Miss Me or I've Been Waiting All this Time for You. I only remember bits of most of them. I remember singing some of them for him when I was sooo young, younger than 5, too young to know what the words meant. And sometimes it makes me think about songs like they are people, who go away. I still have a song (Favorite Place) by my high school boyfriend's band (Planet) on one of my earliest mix tapes (Delaney's Faves Volume 1) (which also features Boys II Men and Candlebox) and I think, that was a great song. They weren't a great band, but it was a song that you could sing along to. And for years now, that boyfriend is gone, that band broke up, that song only exists on high school girlfriend mixtapes, a terrible grainy recording made in a garage, and it makes me feel lonely for it. Like the song got banished to outer space with all the garbage and comet shrapnel, and nobody will make it real anymore. It's sort of a velveteen rabbit soft spot for me.

A Moment in Song, v. 1 & 2

I don't mind being the one hundred billionth person to write about the power of music to transport you to another time or place. Good food can do it, like my previous rant about my grandmother's devil's food cake; how easy it is to conjure the red carpet, apricot trees and apothecary jars of 1552 Jacob Ave. exactly how it was only in my childhood? Or in Ratatouille, when Anton Ego takes a bite of exquisitely sliced eggplant and tomatoes, and is immediately a skinny boy with huge eyes in his mother's kitchen (when we saw this in the theatres, the kid sitting behind us whispered, "I feel like that sometimes"). So it is with music. Here are two examples at the forefront of my mind right now:

Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Smashing Pumpkins:

Backstage in Vanguard Theatre, in the Fine Arts building, in college. I'm on my hands and knees, painting a canvas backdrop that will be the focus image of the stage design for Working, a musical we're putting on, I'm guessing Spring of 1997. Is that right? I can't remember. Doug Cook, my good friend and theatre teacher (and freshman orientation advisor), comes into the backstage area through the door near my boss Tim's office. Doug is wearing his full-length gray Dickie's jumpsuit that he keeps in his office to put over his teacher clothes when there is painting to be done. He is singing, at the top of his lungs, "DESPITE ALL MY RAGE I AM STILL JUST A RAT IN A CAGE!!!" and the sound is echoing through the catwalk and proscenium.

Let's Get It On, Marvin Gaye:

Summer 2002, Dunn School, Los Olivos, California. It's Jansen Family Reunion week, and we're all bunked up on the campus of my Mom's school, having pool parties, making videos, getting on each other's nerves. For the first time since before things like this mattered, I am single. This puts me in the unenviable position of having to sleep on the couch in the living room of the house we have borrowed, while my sisters (and their boyfriends) occupy the guest room and master suite. Four or five of my male cousins sleep on the floor around the couch. This summer, their favorite thing to do is record the sound of their farts into Simon's computer. And also to clog up toilets by not flushing them for several days. My plumber uncles are not amused by this. These boys, however, find pretty much anything brown to be the height of hilarity.

Friday, the night before everyone has to leave, we have an impromptu dance party at Mark and Amy's house. It probably wasn't officially impromptu, Amy and I have the annoying habit of trying to PLAN things like spontaneous dance parties, but this one balmy night in August, it works. The less fleet-footed members of the family are outside, admiring the waning crescent moon through a telescope, while the rest of us are hoofing it in the living room to disco and r & b classics. This is the family that I grew up with, my mother's brothers and their wives and kids. My little grandmother is parked on the couch, clapping along with the music and cooing over particularly athletic feats of footwork. This is the last time I remember recognizing her when I looked at her face. The boys want to participate in the revelry but don't want to be caught doing anything as gay (the opposite of brown) as dance with the grownups, so they are just zooming around the house, sliding on the hardwoods in their socks. Beau ignores my beckoning, but Simon is willing to step up and boogie with me, and Brandon is, instead of dancing, posing in familiar bodybuilder stances. I put on Let's Get It On, the Jack Black version from High Fidelity, and my mom and my Uncle John take this one very seriously. He's flinging her around and dancing in swerving circles and Mom has her arms in the air and is swaying her hips. In one particularly inspired move, she reaches up and unpins her hair, and swings her head with a flourish, and Uncle John steps back as if he's lost his breath. I am envious of their friendship; every year she and I make great strides towards dissolving the structures of traditional mother-daughter confinements, but I don't know if she'll ever be, around me, the way she is so easy with her brothers. Aunt Paula is dancing with Brandon, and Amy and I are in the middle of the room, twirling each other under each arm like ballerinas.

Later that evening, I'm riding my mom's bicycle. It has been years since I've been on a bike, and just like the cliche, I'm suprised by how easily the motions come back to me, the act of balancing, braking, steering. The night is cool, the moon is near and bright, and I'm thinking about how seldom I am alone outside at night. I'm inclined to be a little bit spooked by this thought, and in a small way it makes me very conscious of my single-ness; ordinarily I would be walking home with Brandes. I keep thinking, I'm too old to be single, to start again! And then I consider my mom, and she's single too, and that idea and process was so unthinkable when it started and then it somehow became okay. And then it became the only life any of us could imagine. This is the week I have been told that my ex-boyfriend has died, and many larger thoughts of mortality and maturity and the future are looming. But for tonight, surrounded by the reality of family, I have never felt safer in my life.