Someone on my Livejournal friends list posted something about this last night--how memory can be such a funny thing. Smell is one of the big ones, but sound can do it, too--and it happened to me this morning.
The first thing you have to understand is that my mom is the one responsible for a lot of the things about me, especially my love of music. She tells stories about me, four years old, standing up in the back seat and singing Hot Blooded. And let's not forget that John Denver classic, Tokey Oads.
What, she's my mom, of course she tells embarrassing stories!
But then, there was the time she was in town for my high school graduation, and driving me to my last day of school, Rod Stewart's Forever Young came on, and I remember the two of us in the car, crying. She was trying to tell me what the song meant, from her perspective, and just couldn't do it. It was the first time she said she was proud of me, in spite of everything, and the last time I heard it for a good seven years or more.
Or the first concert that I remember going to--Moody Blues at the Huntsman Center in Utah. How she arranged for one of my classmates to babysit my brother, and she and my stepdad went with me, and our seats were so good (even though they were toward the back of the floor section) that we could see the jewelry they were wearing.
She was the Cool Mom, too, the one who volunteered to take me and two of my friends to see Def Leppard. Their parents never knew that she went because she *wanted* to go--and the girls, well, they thought she was just the coolest ever for that. When she agreed to smuggle in film for our cameras along with her, well, that was just the icing on the cake. Most of my pictures didn't develop well. I wish I could remember what happened to them.
So anyway, there's always been a strong connection with music for me. And, perhaps amusingly, none of these things are the reasons why I thought about her, either--not exactly.
On the radio this morning, I heard Jack and Diane, and though I've heard the song a lot since, for some reason, *this* morning, it prompted another one of those memories I'd forgotten I even had. There's a part in the song that says, "Hold onto sixteen as long as you can," and I remember... I was probably 12 or 13 at the time, and very proudly told my mom that I was going to find some way to do that. I'd claim to turn 16 when I turned 14, and claim to *still* be 16 even when I was turning 18.
It wasn't the claiming to be 16 at 18 that bothered her, really, but the thought of me acting like a 16 year old when I was 14. I don't even remember what she said exactly, except that I shouldn't be in such a hurry to grow up.
For some reason, it strikes me funny, thinking back on that, and on the trip I took back to North Carolina the summer I turned 15. I got stuck in St. Louis for a long layover, and ended up with one of the airport's employees hitting on me. He made me take his address and phone number with me when I left--at 15, what was I going to do? I was too pole-axed by the whole thing. It wasn't until I was safely in the air that one of the girls who I was sitting with commented that he thought I was 18. Oops. :)
Posted by Liz at October 14, 2004 05:44 AM