Like the rest of the world, I had a hard start to 2020, made harder by the fact that my house was empty of kittycat feet for the first time in nearly 18 years. I missed Molly the most when I was home in a quiet house, and the pandemic made for a lot of that, even when my husband started working from home in March.
I’m not a dog person, and definitely not a kid person, but I am 100-percent a cat person, in case that isn’t obvious. I missed Molly so much, and so many other changes coming after her death just made it harder. Everything was different. At Christmas we had a Molly, I had a career that was going somewhere. James was working from his office, which gave him the social interaction that he needs, and me the necessary time and focus to successfully work, write and create. We had planned a year full of travel, fun and forward motion. And then, of course, it stopped. And while we still have our health, most of our income, and the basics and many extras of the life that we enjoy, we have lost a lot, too. We both lost close family members in the first part of the year, and even our neighborhood still looks weird and a little bleak after the tornado that blew through in October 2019.
Molly was my first cat, so I hadn’t been through this process before. I still missed her so much, but over time, was also opening up to the idea of bringing something good into the still too-quiet house. But, had enough time passed? Would I be able to love potential kittens for who they were, or would they be “not-Mollys,” which would be unfair to them?
A few weeks after Molly died, I was out with friends when James got home from work, It was the first time that he had to experience coming into the silent house without me or Molly in it. He was greeted by a little black cat, a House Panther, who approached him, scratched a little bit on the welcome mat and then walked away. We had not seen this cat before, and have not seen it since. But James felt, and I agreed, that maybe it was an intermediary, sent to tell him that Molly was okay and that there would be more cats in our lives, and that would also be okay.
When we started putting “cat vibes” out into the world, I didn’t care what the kitties looked like, where they came from, if they had three legs or one eye or anything like that. I just wanted cats that were healthy and didn’t hide, and I wanted two, so that they could have more companionship than Molly had, especially as we plan to resume travel in the future.
We jokingly began looking for kittens under bushes and in ditches on our evening walks, and I even had a song, “Where are you, Kittens?” set to the tune of “Where are you, Christmas?” that I’d sing around the house.
And there’s a song by Crosby, Stills and Nash, “Our House,” that I’d listen to and feel so sad. “With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy because of you…” I wanted easy. I was ready for it. In my world, I felt things would feel “easy” when the cats came, because the noise and the feedings, playing, misbehaving, all of that would make the house feel normal, and normal was close enough to easy.
So, in early May we went to East Texas for my Auntie’s funeral, and I got a lead on some cats. On my birthday, the 15th, we decided it was time to choose two, and the next weekend, we met my mom, cousin and aunt in Athens, Texas and picked Bonnie and Beans from a huge cat carrier where they were lounging with their siblings.
Beans is a black kitty, a House Panther chosen not only for his expressive face, but also because he reminds us of that little kitty of hope that visited James in January. Bonnie’s bright eyes and “fairy ears” charmed us immediately. Being Texas cats, they have Texas formal names: Bluebonnet, and Bosque Coffee Bean. But Bonnie and Beans for everyday.
Now everything is easi(er). Easy? No way. We are still in a pandemic. James is still set up on his laptop in the middle of the living room while I carve out a few hours here and there to try and pick up the pieces of my career and creative practice with the ground still shifting under my feet. Covid is still raging and now it’s in my home community in East Texas, which is scary because there are many fewer resources there, and the population skews older and more fragile. I don’t know when we will travel again – we have planned trips and canceled them at least three times in all this, and I’m really sad that I won’t be going to LA this September to see the beach and art adventure, and to see my old friends, and meet their new baby.
But we have the kittens, and with them, a routine. Kitten food, play time, naps, more food and TV time before bed. They don’t know anything about a pandemic, they just explore and romp and play. They are fun to watch. They’re lap cats who love toys, unlike Molly, who was of course still perfect in every way. Having two, it’s fun to watch them interact. They take turns tossing a toy mousie around, and they love to be carried from room to room in what we refer to as “the royal procession.” Sweet Beans has attached himself to James, and Bonnie runs around chortling like a delighted banshee. They are happy cats. It’s nice to feel like we are doing something right. When things feel so hard, it’s nice that something is easy.
Good Gravy. Nothing like a little pandemic to make every life choice seem both vitally important and totally inconsequential. I think everyone’s theme word for the year simultaneously shifted to Survive. Rightfully so. It’s hard to focus on “enlightened” needs right now. I mean, when your house is burning, who cares if the bed is made?
None of us are in control right now, if we ever even were.
It’s a lot for me, and for you and for everyone in the whole world.
So what is an everyday person to do? Those of us who don’t work in a vital service industry or on the heroic front lines of health care probably find ourselves at a loss right now. We do the right thing by following public health policies, supporting local businesses, tipping extra…and then what? Speaking for myself, when I get to the part of my brain that controls my “what about me?” response, I don’t have a lot of answers right now.
But “what about me?” is a valid question. We function as a society and work for its good, but we matter as individuals, too. It matters if my business fails or if your company furloughs you. It matters that your kids can’t play with their best friends for who knows how long, or if you don’t get to hug your loved one when they’re ill. It matters! And it’s all happening at once!
The best I can come up with is to share some practical advice from a boss I really liked at a job I really hated.
This workplace was super toxic and extremely full of itself, and every day was an exercise in back room dealings, corporate caste systems and general treachery. It brought out the worst in everyone. But in the middle of all that was my team, which I liked and a boss, who I respected. When I’d go to her office to talk about the latest lie, injustice or general nonsense we had been subjected to and ask how to respond, she’d say “We are going to come to work every day, do our jobs and do our best. We will do exactly what we have been doing.” It was hard to hear sometimes, because it is human to want to react, to fight back or defend ourselves. But since then, I think of that advice when things get so chaotic that my judgement is clouded.
So right now, that’s what I am doing. There is too much to think about, and it is so hard to make decisions when the global landscape changes so quickly, not to mention the simple matter of all the extra steps we have to take to stay healthy and alive.
When things began to shut down, I panicked. My business was just starting to take off, and suddenly, not only could I literally not do it, I also had to try and stay top of mind with my (relatively new) connections without having anything real to offer. No travel meant no meaningful updates for my social channels, etc. I have been a freelance writer for years, but had decided to cut back to grow the business. Scramble time all around. I feel like I’ve pivoted so much I’m back at the beginning! And technically, we (in Texas) are still in month one!
But I am trying to follow the good advice that my former boss shared. Every day, I wake up and I go to work. I stay the course. I am trying new initiatives and projects but nothing drastically different than I was doing six weeks ago, and I’m not knocking myself out to put out new stuff all the time. I’ve temporarily resumed more freelance writing work, because its a known entity, and my other work doesn’t take up 40 hours right now. I’m trying really hard to stay in my lane and succeeding, mostly.
I’m creating art, of course, and writing creatively as well. But right now, those things seem like luxuries. Beneficial and important luxuries, but luxuries all the same. So, I’ll get back to that later, in a different post. I don’t want to be mistaken for being someone who thinks all of this a “blessing,” or a call to “slow down” or to “take time to dance.” If we are dancing, it is because there are hot coals under our feet.
Make room for pleasure, definitely and relax when you can. If you are a spiritual person, lean on your faith. But self care, and even spiritual faith can also look like showing up for your professional, family or personal responsibilities; doing what you need to do, and doing your best.
“Slumgullion (The Venerate Outpost)” Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, OK.
Late last year, I posted about taking a “sabbatical year” to focus on my personal and professional creative work. Whether you call it Murphy’s Law or the universe saying “hold my beer,” my good intentions left the rails almost immediately.
In January alone the cat died, James’ aunt died, James spent a week in Las Vegas with his work and I lost what felt like an entire day in a suburban Chico’s while my mom tried on various “perfect black pants” that all looked exactly the same. We went to East Texas and drove to the beach for a day with my parents. I worked, kept up the house, saw friends when I could, read a bit, watched some TV and then it was February and time to plan my first art tour. And so on, and so on. I felt like I inhaled at the end of December and exhaled sometime in the last week or so.
Great sabbatical mindset, right?
But some things have gone well. I use social media and my mobile devices less and less, which feels better and better. I still don’t pick up my phone or iPad until after I have had coffee and read a bit. That has been nice, and as a bonus, helps navigate and give perspective to the wild news cycles.
I also had time to think about a word for the year, or for the next ten months rather, since it was almost March by the time I got around to it. “Establish.”
Last year’s word was “Forward.” At the start of 2019 I was sitting with a lot of uncertainty over things that weren’t moving as they should, proverbial centers that I knew simply would not hold. So in the trend of picking a theme word for the year, “Forward” was a good touchstone, an idea to make decisions around, and a reminder to take risks and just make the decisions I needed to be somewhere other than I was, and get back to liking my life.
In my last corporate job, I was responsible for building IT processes and setting global business priorities. This involved taking a great deal of data and qualitative input from our markets around the world, accounting for risks and uncertainties, and organizing that information into policies that our entire global ecosystem would agree to participate in and abide by for tasks like bug resolution, feature implementation and new initiatives requests. It was extremely difficult, and I say this as someone who also had to manage a complex, high stakes, multi-vendor, multi-time zone code update around the devaluation of the Belarusian ruble. (Understand why I work in art now? Haha.)
I loved discovering, analyzing and organizing all the information, but some of the other details…not so much.
But I am a framework person, and frameworks help my creative and personal life just as much as they helped my big, messy corporate life. They keep information from overwhelming me and also build in things to look forward to. I can’t predict what positive results will be, but I truly believe that by following healthy habits, positive results will come. And that is exciting.
2019 was so “Forward” that it blew past the finish line and into 2020, I guess. But after a well-earned few weeks to rest and reset, better late than never, I am ready to “Establish.”
Where does this fit into the idea of a sabbatical year? Establishing a solid foundation directly supports the creative, personal and professional goals that I have for 2020. Establishing gives me a concrete, manageable idea to focus on, and a consistent, larger goal when individual priorities compete or become confusing. It is also a logical next step from “Forward.” While I wouldn’t want to pick 2021’s word so early, I am hoping that I’m preparing myself for years to come in which I can launch.
This is the story of the big life of a little cat.
Molly’s life with me began in July 2002, when I had just moved back from New York City to Austin. I wasn’t happy with the move, and thought I’d get myself a cat as a consolation prize.
But before that, in May, I was in New York, walking with a friend who was visiting for the day from New Haven. “David’s cat had kittens!” she said, referring to her boyfriend at home in Austin, an old friend who had and has been in my life since I was 16.
“Is there an orange one?” I asked.
“Yes!”
“I’d like to see that kitten!” I said, looking around me and thinking that a furry friend would be just the thing to take the sting out of leaving all the exciting things and opportunities that surrounded me in that moment.
A few weeks later, I left New York, with an orange kitten on my mind. I know what you’re thinking, Molly wasn’t orange! No, she wasn’t! Stay with me.
I moved back to Austin, into an empty one-bedroom with an inflatable mattress, a huge indigo plastic iMac and no other furniture. After a few days of pushing the mattress from room to room to “settle in,” I was ready to pay David a visit.
At the time, David was living a few blocks from UT, with at least one roommate and what seemed like 100 cats who seemed to be everywhere all at once. Big kitten energy, is what I’m saying. I stepped around the rolling balls of fur and teeth, and settled on the couch while David made introductions.
“I’m keeping that one.” He pointed at a sweet, silky white boy kitten with big eyes. “This one has been scratching her ear a lot.” He pointed at a beautiful tabby while I priced ear drops in my head. I looked over at the orange one, the prize I had come for, just as David pointed at him. “I think T-Bone has been pooping under the couch.”
“Hm, way to sell those cats, David.” I thought. He ended up keeping all of them except for Molly, so he probably didn’t actually want to sell them at all. But I had a decision to make.
As I was pondering ear drops vs. the stealth pooper, a friendly calico toddled up to me and raised on her back legs, balancing her paws on my jeans. I looked at her, then David. He had nothing to say.
“Maybe this one,” I said, stroking her soft fur. The other cats weren’t very interested in me, but this cat was immediately. “Definitely this one.”
“I thought I’d name her Tank Girl.” David said.
“Hmm,” I looked at the kitten’s face. “Don’t let him name me Tank Girl!” It seemed to say. She had an “M” marking above her right eyebrow. “How about Molly?”
And that was that. She stayed with David for a few more days while I got her litter box, bowl and starter set of cat toys, then we loaded her up in a boxy green plastic carrier and I drove, as slowly and carefully as I could with the precious cargo, down 24th Street and up MoPac, across 183 and onward to my apartment.
I knew my life had changed. When we got home, I remember unlatching the carrier and sitting on the inflatable mattress waiting for her to come out in her own time. After about 15 minutes, she did. We were home.
The joke was on me, because while Molly never pooped under the couch, she peed everywhere. A bladder condition diagnosis and medicine took care of that, but she never stopped preferring a soft carpet, couch or bed comforter to cushion her paws vs. scratchy litter and a drafty box. I think she was 16 before she was an exclusive box-user. She also pushed her way through my newspapers when I was reading them, knocked stuff off the counters and jumped to and from the highest cabinets in my apartment while I begged her to behave. In other words, she was a Grade A Normal Kitten. One night I couldn’t get her to take her bladder pills, which I would wipe in strawberry cream cheese and stick to my finger, hoping she would just open up and let me put it on her tongue. (Why yes, she was my first indoor cat! Why do you ask?) She became agitated and I had to put her in the bathroom and call David to come help medicate his damn cat. He stopped by an hour later, rolled her up in a towel like a burrito and had her pilled in about two minutes. She did everything but say “Aah” and get a lollipop. She was a stinker.
Molly, 2005
And by stinker, I mean, she was the best. She loved Bob Marley and other music with a deep, dance hall beat, and music with reedy voices and instruments, like the Dixie Chicks, sent her into a biting, scratching rage her whole life. She wasn’t a lap cat, but she loved being close to her people and spent most of her final weeks snuggled against me while my husband James and I watched The Crown on TV. Molly loved TV time and strangely enough, had the same preferences that we did.
She enjoyed being where the action was, always part of the conversation circle or checking out houseguests’ suitcases, making sure they were all settled in. Until I met James in 2008, it was just Molly and me and a short parade of not-James’s, some who she liked a lot (the small-town vegan) and others who made her hiss and leap sideways (information withheld because, well, let’s just say Molly often picked up on things that I didn’t.) We spent a lot of time by ourselves. In the early days, I was a newspaper reporter and worked odd hours. Most nights, I’d unwind with her by watching some late-night Cheaters TV and enjoying International Delight coffees. (Remember, I was 26, it was 2002 and “coffee culture” was years away, as were the good cable channels.) Sometimes I’d be home so late, and so tired that I could only hold out the feather stick limply while she jumped at it, desperate for playtime after being home alone all day while I chased down stories about mercury in the local fishing lake and small town petty shit.
I talked to her all the time. I said, “please move,” when she blocked my path to bully me for treats. “Excuse me,” when I brushed past her reaching for the remote. “Thank you, Molly,” when she obeyed a request (there were never really any commands in our dynamic) or gave me kitty kisses. She heard so many stories and so much dirt on so many people. I’d like to think she was as shocked and appalled as I was when people misbehaved or there was drama to share.
Because of this, she was very in tune with people. “She understands tone!” I’d later say to James, who seemed to buy it but I’m not so sure. But she did understand! James likes to remind me that Molly’s brain was the size of a walnut, but it must have been all empathy.
When a friend who had just lost her father was crying at my kitchen table, Molly was there with knee pats and purrs. When I lost a close friend to suicide in 2007, she barely left my side for the months that it took me to get through a day without losing it. When James lost his dad, Molly was right there with us on the couch working through it as a family.
We went on like this for almost 18 years, Molly and me, and beginning in 2010, Molly, James and me. I have so many stories, and to tell them all would be to write a book. She was my best friend. When I looked at her, I knew the world was right. The night before my wedding, I opted out of staying at a hotel so that I could spend the night at home with Molly. One of James’ and my wedding debates was what tier of the cake Molly’s figurine should go on. (I won. She was placed on the top tier with us. I mean, where else would she be?) When we moved in 2018, we had to leave her in the old apartment bathroom all day while the movers did their thing. We freed her around 10:30 that night and drove through Whataburger, the cat carrier on my lap like a puzzle piece. When she first got sick and we knew the end was coming, I’d wake up in the night and see the silhouette of her ears in the dark, right where they were supposed to be. “What happens without this?” I thought.
Molly was, for a long time, the very best thing in my life. Until I met James and had two best things. And she was the most constant thing in what was a very transient and not always great life. Because of my newspaper career, we moved four times in the first three years alone. We did not always have consistency in income or a stable place to plan the future from. Most of my close friends live elsewhere, so Molly was my only steady companion for most of our years together, and you can probably get an idea of my dating life from the “made the cat hop sideways” anecdote above. (But nobody mistreated Molly! Not only would that have been an instant dealbreaker, she was universally beloved even by those who she herself could take or leave.)
Molly, 2003
What was life going to look like without that stabilizing influence, being able to see, interact and care for a companion who had filled that role for 17 years. That is such a long time! Molly’s social media presence predates even MySpace by many years! She was an early Friendster adopter. When she was tiny I put her photo on RateMyKitten but then deleted it when someone said it looked like she was wearing makeup. It weirded me out for some reason. But, Molly was totally Generation Z, a Digital Native by Gen X proxy.
My friends started having babies right after I got Molly. She was the oldest. As the years flew, I couldn’t help but compare their ages, and wonder what human Molly would be doing. The ages came and went where she could drive, vote, buy cigarettes, start high school. I don’t have kids, by choice, but it was still an interesting thought exercise.
But a cat is not a person. Adopting a cat, as James liked to remind me, is both a promise made to a kitten and accepting a small tragedy. I knew that it was highly unlikely that Molly would outlive us, and still I hoped. With each birthday, I thought maybe she’d live a long time and be not just old, but really, really old. A Guinness World Record of a cat. But without old cat health problems, because I wanted her to always feel good.
She felt “good” until about three weeks before she died, and I’m grateful for that. There are so many things I’m grateful for. Her facial tumor made her look like she had a jaw full of chewing tobacco, but didn’t hurt her. She was mobile and playing, albeit with some painkiller help, until the morning we said goodbye. The only time she really slowed down was in the final week, between Christmas and New Year, and that just meant that she spent most of her time in one of a warren of Christmas package boxes we had set up in our breakfast nook. We learned to read the boxes. The big one meant she was feeling okay. The medium-sized box on its side meant she wanted to rest but also see the world. The tiny Target box with tissue paper still in it meant “My painkillers are wearing off. Pretend you don’t see me until I can have another one.”
Molly, Dec. 2019
On the last night of her 17 years and nine months, she watched The Crown finale on the couch with us, played with Christmas Tree branches, gave her rolling ball toy a few hearty whacks and went to sleep after a healthy dose of painkillers melted into a Brothful. (Aside – did you know there’s a whole product industry based around soup for cats?!) The next morning, James woke up, gave her heart pills, breakfast, treats and medicated eye wash, then took his shower. Molly made a normal lap through the bedroom where I was, then suddenly broke in to a panicked run all the way to the closet in my art studio and hid in the far corner of the farthest closet. Molly was old, sore and had not run for anything in probably a year. Something obviously awful and bad and non-salvageable had happened.
In the last few weeks of her life, when we chilled on the couch, I’d ask “Molly, is it time?” and give her a good, clear look to see if I could tell. Because, for as long and as much as Molly and I “talked,” she was a cat and could not really talk. I knew she loved her life and wanted to keep it, and I also knew that James and I would have to understand what her limits were so not to prolong the inevitable. Usually, she’d just kind of look at me and go back to TV or bathing herself or whatever it was that she was doing. She was trucking along. Tank Girl until the end.
But that morning, Jan. 2, I didn’t have to ask. At that point, we had to force a radical shift in our perspective from “Molly, our friend and family member” to “Molly, who is a terminally ill animal and just wants to not hurt.” We called our vet, and took her in immediately. After our vet confirmed our suspicions that Molly wouldn’t recover from her cancer-related injury, we, as a team, decided to let her go.
My strongest memory of that day is when the vet brought her back from the staff exam room, a little tranquilized and buzzed but not asleep yet. They had wrapped Molly in a pink blanket like a little baby. Molly was alert, ears up and scanning the room for James and me. When she saw us and was placed on the table, we had a few precious, priceless moments with her to give kisses, head butts and “I love you’s” before she started to slip into sedation for the next step. I honestly don’t remember much after that, only that leaving the vet’s office without her cat carrier, which we donated to the clinic, was the weirdest and one of the hardest things I have ever experienced. It was like leaving your wallet on the bus, if your wallet had your 17-year old cat in it and you’ll never get it back.
This is the story of Molly, but as with all stories, there is more to it.
James and I were visiting David this past weekend. Molly’s mom and siblings (ear drops and the couch pooper, aka Lucy and T-Bone) had passed in spring of 2019 and beautiful Mad Dog had crossed the bridge years earlier. It was the first time in nearly 18 years that I’d see David and not have cats in common to talk about. So, we spent a happy couple of hours talking about the cats we used to have.
“You know the story, right?” He asked. I did, but I wanted to hear it again.
Turns out, I didn’t know the whole story.
Molly’s mom Ella was a stray who David took in. There was a medical delay in getting her fixed, and between the first time she went in and the time he took her back for the surgery, she snuck out a bathroom window and went on a little Rumspringa. When the vet saw her again, she was pregnant with kittens.
Molly’s story, and the story of her siblings runs on such a thin margin that it is nearly cosmic. There are so many scenarios where Molly would not have been with me. I reconnected with David in the late 1990s, through a situation that wasn’t great, but having Molly come from it made the chaos completely worth it. If I hadn’t spent the day in New York with Audrey, who happened to mention David’s cats. If T-Bone hadn’t been in a sneaky pooping phase. If Ella hadn’t escaped, or if she had been fixed at that first appointment. If Molly hadn’t so obviously made herself known at the kitten-choosing night.
I would have missed so much and never even known it. I know I would have probably found another cat, and a different joy, but it would not have been this joy. I love my life with Molly, all the ups and downs, both of our bad behavior, the expense and responsibility that comes with pet ownership, everything. Even the end of it that was so scary and consuming with the medicine and her encroaching, very obvious tumor and eye issues that I assured her just made her look more interesting.
At the beginning of this story, I said that I thought a kitten would be a consolation prize, a second place compromise between a life in New York that I so badly wanted and the life I was expected to lead. It shames me to write that now. How wrong I was. Consolation prize? She was the blue ribbon of my whole entire life. Aside from my marriage, which didn’t happen until 2012, she was the first and only thing that was ever truly mine, the first unconditional love I ever experienced in either direction. We figured the whole pet ownership thing out together and I didn’t always get it right, but I know she loved me in whatever ways a cat can love and she inspired me to do my best for her. A night or two before she died, we were relaxing on the couch and I scratched her head. She looked at me as a geriatric cat with a lopsided face and bad eye, but I could clearly see love, or something like it in her face. I felt strongly then, that even if she wasn’t ready to go at that time, that when she did go, that our lives together really had been everything to each other, and to James, that they were supposed to be. That it was okay for this chapter of our story together to end.
Molly, 2015
In my last post, I wrote about being on a Rickie Lee Jones kick. This coincided with Molly’s final weeks around the end of the year, so Molly got to enjoy it, too. When I hear “The Horses” now, I think of Molly and for now it makes me sad, although I know it won’t always.
I am pretty positive “The Horses” wasn’t written for a dying cat, but that’s how I see it. I think of the Pegasus and Equuleus constellations and how Molly is in the stars now, riding the horses in the sky. In my mind, I see her leaping from star to star, playing as free and easy as she did in the early days when she leapt from my countertop to the top kitchen cabinet and back down to the side table. Maybe we all come from the stars and go back to them. It’s not for me to know. I do know that the beauty and promise of wherever Molly is, is that she’ll never fall again. But I hope she still knows in her heart, or whatever source of light that is left and is still her, that I”ll be here to pick her up until it is my turn to meet her there.
**Disclaimer: With time doing what time does, direct quotes may be paraphrased, but they and the accompanied scenarios are true to the best of my memory.
While I haven’t written a Pine Curtain Storyin a while, they’re always on my mind, waiting for the right time and way to be told. I know they’ll be back soon. I think about those stories all the time. Not because I’m living in the past or wish to (no thanks!) but because I feel they’re important and timeless; both the smaller focus on my friends and I, and the larger focus on what it meant and still means to have been a teenage girl in a specific time and place.
Like any good daydreamer, I have a list of songs that I would choose for a soundtrack to my future Pine Curtain movie. It evolves, but it’s mostly eighties and early nineties alt-rock. The latest addition is Rickie Lee Jones’ “Satellites,” which to me perfectly describes the relationships in Pine Curtain Stories.
“So you keep talking in many languages/ Telling us the way you feel…”
When we were younger we had so many creative “languages” to communicate in – folded notes, made up stories, prank calls and other outward expressions, even collages and cartoons and of course, the treasured mix tape. If we could think of a way to express an emotion or idea, we did, even if it was weird, risky or poorly-executed.
And that goes away.
Now there are text messages, emails, social media…meetups and video calls and viral videos…and all of those things are clinical and ultimately dilute the message for the sender and the receiver.
And yet, we are satellites. Some of us are in touch more than others and we are all busy and scattered, at the same time we are bound by those years we spent together. I can think of something that happened in 1991 and immediately feel exactly how I felt then, and remember who was there and what their voices sounded like and what style of clothing they were wearing. If it was nighttime, I can hear the cicadas or wind blowing through the pine trees. I can remember what was playing on the stereo and the sound of car wheels on gravel when we pulled over to socialize on the nights we cruised endlessly between the local mall on one side of town and the Sonic drive-in on the other side.
Satellites homing in on a shared constant.
I wish there were more songs that brought to mind early friendships. Most of the songs on my “future soundtrack” are pretty angsty or about boys. But as the heroes of these stories, we need an anthem just for us. This is a strong contender.
