The past few days have been filled with deep thoughts for me, coming from several different directions.
Most of the things I post on Facebook usually fall into one of two categories — either pointless jokes to try and make people smile, or more thought-provoking topics that might generate conversation. I made two posts this past week that sparked the kind of discussion I’m usually hoping for in that second category. One was contemplating the nature of true friendship, while the other evolved into a lengthy chain of exchanged compliments.
Following that, there was an evening this past week, after the end of the school day, when I was caught up in a deep conversation with a colleague. She had spent much of the past year working through a serious illness, and apparently a comment I made had helped precipitate a small emotional breakthrough for her. We spoke about it for quite some time, comparing our experiences from different perspectives, and considering how seemingly random occurrences can become formative influences in how we think about our lives.
Yesterday was kind of a big day, being the birthday of a close friend. It was a milestone birthday of sorts, since it’s the second one to have come and gone since he died last year. Similarly, today is also kind of a big day, because it’s a milestone birthday for a very close cousin, one who is more like a sister to me, and I know the idea of her birthday will be a presence throughout my day.
Last night I finally made time to watch a new music DVD I have, the video of a concert I attended with one of my best friends a couple summers ago (we were even in one crowd shot for nearly two seconds!). It was a performance of one of our favorite bands reuniting to play one of our favorite albums live, for the first time ever. It’s an album that holds great personal meaning to me beyond just enjoying it musically, because it provides so many connections to experiences and memories related to the time my sister was dying.
Later today I’ll be at the visitation for the mother of a friend and colleague. Knowing this is coming up gives the time before the vaguely mournful feeling that follows the passing of any loved one, but as my friend has said repeatedly over the past few days, her mother had lived a long life and was ready when it was finally time. I try to see situations like this as, at least partially, a chance to celebrate the life that has passed instead of grieve it, but the fresh pain of the loss and the pervasive sense of absence that follows always carries unavoidable moments. I know she’ll be feeling some of those in the coming weeks.
So, like I said, it’s been a week of deep thoughts. This got me wondering: Why is it people tend to associate the idea of deep thoughts with things more related to death and sadness than happiness and life? Maybe when life is going forward as we expect it to, we don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to question what happiness means because we’re just caught up in how it feels, and we’re glad to be in that state. We know we’ll eventually have to navigate more challenging times, but in those better moments it’s enough to know that happiness is defining our present, whether or not we take time to acknowledge it. I think that’s why the compliment post generated the reaction it did. I don’t know if we typically allow ourselves the chance to either appreciate the things happening to us in those better moments, or the positive things that the people surrounding us bring into our lives. We just get used to accepting they are there.
On the subject of birthdays, and of over-reflective thinking, I’ve got my own landmark birthday coming up this spring. It doesn’t have me feeling old or spinning off into an age-related crisis of any kind; I’ve come to think of getting older as having another year of life my sister never got to experience. Birthdays are usually low-key and relatively unimportant to me, at least when they’re mine, but this one feels like there’s intrinsic meaning beyond what I would assign to it. I’m not sure it means I have to celebrate it with a fancy sheet cake covering three square yards or anything, but (much to what I’m sure is nobody’s surprise) it has me reflecting. Not so much contemplating things like missed opportunities or regrets, even though many of both are scattered throughout my younger days. Instead I’m thinking more about the time ahead. I don’t believe so much in the idea of a bucket list, but I can certainly think of life experiences I would still like to have, that because of procrastination, hesitation, inhibition, self-doubt, or circumstances at least partially outside of my control have eluded me so far. I’m hoping to make this year into one that could start me on the path of exploring more of those things.
Maybe achieving that could be as simple as proactively deciding for things to be that way. Maybe it could come from having been alive long enough to reach the point where I finally know better.
Maybe it will come down to being bold and vulnerable enough to do things outside of the norm, like purposefully acknowledge the better moments, or just offering people the compliments they deserve which would usually remain unspoken.
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Thursday, December 28, 2017
The Night Billie Joe Armstrong Brought Me Back to Life
With only days remaining in 2017, I can say it was a year of extraordinary personal highs and lows.
Things started rough. I had lost one of the best friends of my adult life in mid-November of 2016. If that trauma wasn’t enough, something he shared with me during one of our final visits led to an existential tailspin that haunted me for months after. I essentially skipped the entire Christmas season. I lost both the motivation and interest to write, so I simply stopped. Despite several subtle nudges of encouragement, I didn’t bother with my ridiculous Christmas elf story until someone literally left a stuffed dog and a writing prompt at my front door, and thank God for that because I had no idea how badly I needed it.
January and February have never been my favorite months of year, so trudging through the winter with mountains of doubt and self-loathing, as so many worst-case scenarios about the country were being realized daily, didn’t help. As tightly as I thought I was keeping a lid on everything, signs of concern from people around me kept coming up; I’m a classic introvert so I dismissed them, telling myself I’d survived harder times before and I’d endure this as well. As winter dragged into spring, it was looking like any resolution that might happen would be coming much later than sooner.
One break from the routine I was looking forward to came on April 1st. Green Day was coming to St. Paul. A huge group of my cousins started planning to see them when the concert was first announced, but the tickets vanished before we were able to secure enough for everyone. My cousin John managed to get a block though, and offered me his final unclaimed ticket.
Green Day had always been one of those ubiquitous bands for me, the kind of auditory wallpaper immediately recognized on the radio, even before “American Idiot” became one of the albums I relied on the most to clarify the pain and rage I felt following my sister’s death. Their most recent album, “Revolution Radio,” had come out back in October, and was doing its best to drag me through my ongoing melancholia. I hadn’t seen them live before but they had a reputation for good shows, so I knew it would at least be a distraction from the empty routine of the past several months. I was looking forward to seeing my cousins at least as much as the show, enough to drive two hours out of the Cities just for a few hours more with them that afternoon, and then to spend the night at their house afterward. I needed cousin time.
We got back up to St. Paul in time to have dinner at a Thai place my cousin Sarah and her soon-to-be husband Tyler knew. Our seats in the arena were in the higher altitudes, but gave us a great view of the stage. I don’t remember who the open act was, but after they finished their set my cousin Dennis and I agreed they’d been better than a lot of the other warm-up bands we’d seen before.
When Green Day came on, I was immediately brought into that zone that can happen at a concert when you’re seeing a band you’ve known forever. They played through many of their classics, proving why those songs were classics in the first place. They played some songs I’d always been lukewarm about, revealing more depth and power than I had noticed before. They played through many of my lesser-known favorites, even reminding me of some songs that had been favorites long ago and had since fallen back into the mental archive, with the vitality of live performance bringing back why they had been so important to me.
The singer and guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, was on his A game. When we were in the car after the concert, I posted this on Facebook: “After tonight I can write this here without hesitation: As far as front-man live performance goes, Billie Joe Armstrong has reached the same level as Freddie Mercury and Bruce Springsteen.” Coming from me, this is no small amount of praise. He didn’t stalk the stage so much as attack it, belting out each song as if the life and love of all the world hung in the balance, taking control of the anger and frustration that had come to define the times and redirecting it with an angered positivity, refusing to allow for the idea that the current state of society had to stand as it was, not just encouraging the audience to do what they could to make things better, but demanding it. He worked the crowd so effectively it was, without question, the loudest audience I’ve been a part of in my thirty-four years of concert-going.
When they played “Still Breathing,” one of my favorite songs from the newest album, something broke inside of me. The combination of the music, how I had personalized the lyrics in that way people tend to do with favorite songs, and the power of hearing it live was an epiphanal moment. I faced down the issues I’d been struggling with for the previous six months and realized I could be stronger than they were, even as they compounded each other. The possibility that I could take back my life and make it what I wanted began to feel real again as tears filled my eyes and I sang my throat raw. When they played another new favorite, “Forever Now,” near the end of the show, I may have temporarily left my body. By the time the song ended, I felt purged. And cleansed. And ready to move forward again.
Days later, I had turned an idea for a new story into an outline that only continued to grow throughout the spring, and became the first new legitimate manuscript I’ve written in at least five years. During that same spring, I took on something else I’ve avoided my whole life — one of those things that wasn’t big in the grand scheme, but was big for me — and conquered it. Other hurdles came and went as the summer went on, leaving me in a place where the sources of most of my anxieties were conclusively put behind me — some through circumstance, some through my actions.
The coming year promises to be a big one for me, since it will be the year I turn 50. On one hand it’s just another age and not any more significant than any other age, but, like I said earlier, I’m a classic introvert, which means among other things that I spend a lot of time in personal reflection. Because of this, I can see how almost everything that happens to me this year will somehow be filtered through the idea of turning 50.
The surprising thing about this, though? The way I’m facing it. I’m not starting the new year with any sense of low-grade dread, or the ongoing acceptance of an established and occasionally unfulfilling routine. I don’t see any reason to anticipate life taking a turn for the worse, or even going sideways on me. I look at the new calendar I just bought and see the days and months still to come as being open instead of empty.
This year, there’s only optimism.
Still Breathing
Things started rough. I had lost one of the best friends of my adult life in mid-November of 2016. If that trauma wasn’t enough, something he shared with me during one of our final visits led to an existential tailspin that haunted me for months after. I essentially skipped the entire Christmas season. I lost both the motivation and interest to write, so I simply stopped. Despite several subtle nudges of encouragement, I didn’t bother with my ridiculous Christmas elf story until someone literally left a stuffed dog and a writing prompt at my front door, and thank God for that because I had no idea how badly I needed it.
January and February have never been my favorite months of year, so trudging through the winter with mountains of doubt and self-loathing, as so many worst-case scenarios about the country were being realized daily, didn’t help. As tightly as I thought I was keeping a lid on everything, signs of concern from people around me kept coming up; I’m a classic introvert so I dismissed them, telling myself I’d survived harder times before and I’d endure this as well. As winter dragged into spring, it was looking like any resolution that might happen would be coming much later than sooner.
One break from the routine I was looking forward to came on April 1st. Green Day was coming to St. Paul. A huge group of my cousins started planning to see them when the concert was first announced, but the tickets vanished before we were able to secure enough for everyone. My cousin John managed to get a block though, and offered me his final unclaimed ticket.
Green Day had always been one of those ubiquitous bands for me, the kind of auditory wallpaper immediately recognized on the radio, even before “American Idiot” became one of the albums I relied on the most to clarify the pain and rage I felt following my sister’s death. Their most recent album, “Revolution Radio,” had come out back in October, and was doing its best to drag me through my ongoing melancholia. I hadn’t seen them live before but they had a reputation for good shows, so I knew it would at least be a distraction from the empty routine of the past several months. I was looking forward to seeing my cousins at least as much as the show, enough to drive two hours out of the Cities just for a few hours more with them that afternoon, and then to spend the night at their house afterward. I needed cousin time.
We got back up to St. Paul in time to have dinner at a Thai place my cousin Sarah and her soon-to-be husband Tyler knew. Our seats in the arena were in the higher altitudes, but gave us a great view of the stage. I don’t remember who the open act was, but after they finished their set my cousin Dennis and I agreed they’d been better than a lot of the other warm-up bands we’d seen before.
When Green Day came on, I was immediately brought into that zone that can happen at a concert when you’re seeing a band you’ve known forever. They played through many of their classics, proving why those songs were classics in the first place. They played some songs I’d always been lukewarm about, revealing more depth and power than I had noticed before. They played through many of my lesser-known favorites, even reminding me of some songs that had been favorites long ago and had since fallen back into the mental archive, with the vitality of live performance bringing back why they had been so important to me.
The singer and guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, was on his A game. When we were in the car after the concert, I posted this on Facebook: “After tonight I can write this here without hesitation: As far as front-man live performance goes, Billie Joe Armstrong has reached the same level as Freddie Mercury and Bruce Springsteen.” Coming from me, this is no small amount of praise. He didn’t stalk the stage so much as attack it, belting out each song as if the life and love of all the world hung in the balance, taking control of the anger and frustration that had come to define the times and redirecting it with an angered positivity, refusing to allow for the idea that the current state of society had to stand as it was, not just encouraging the audience to do what they could to make things better, but demanding it. He worked the crowd so effectively it was, without question, the loudest audience I’ve been a part of in my thirty-four years of concert-going.
When they played “Still Breathing,” one of my favorite songs from the newest album, something broke inside of me. The combination of the music, how I had personalized the lyrics in that way people tend to do with favorite songs, and the power of hearing it live was an epiphanal moment. I faced down the issues I’d been struggling with for the previous six months and realized I could be stronger than they were, even as they compounded each other. The possibility that I could take back my life and make it what I wanted began to feel real again as tears filled my eyes and I sang my throat raw. When they played another new favorite, “Forever Now,” near the end of the show, I may have temporarily left my body. By the time the song ended, I felt purged. And cleansed. And ready to move forward again.
Days later, I had turned an idea for a new story into an outline that only continued to grow throughout the spring, and became the first new legitimate manuscript I’ve written in at least five years. During that same spring, I took on something else I’ve avoided my whole life — one of those things that wasn’t big in the grand scheme, but was big for me — and conquered it. Other hurdles came and went as the summer went on, leaving me in a place where the sources of most of my anxieties were conclusively put behind me — some through circumstance, some through my actions.
The coming year promises to be a big one for me, since it will be the year I turn 50. On one hand it’s just another age and not any more significant than any other age, but, like I said earlier, I’m a classic introvert, which means among other things that I spend a lot of time in personal reflection. Because of this, I can see how almost everything that happens to me this year will somehow be filtered through the idea of turning 50.
The surprising thing about this, though? The way I’m facing it. I’m not starting the new year with any sense of low-grade dread, or the ongoing acceptance of an established and occasionally unfulfilling routine. I don’t see any reason to anticipate life taking a turn for the worse, or even going sideways on me. I look at the new calendar I just bought and see the days and months still to come as being open instead of empty.
This year, there’s only optimism.
Still Breathing
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Another NaNoWriMo Teaser
Night Ranger was a band that, sadly, history has relegated to the discount bin of 80s music. They were consistent hitmakers and released a series of successful albums, but never established themselves as a band with staying power. They’re still around in some form or other now, touring the casinos of America as a legacy band, usually appearing with collections of other bands in different classic rock packages. They’ll occasionally put out albums of new material, which I usually download out of some sense of leftover band loyalty and a hope that they’ll have two or three great songs buried in the track listing for me to discover. Their songs spoke to both what my high school experience was and what I wished it could have been, but here in the new century they’ve been systematically reduced to being thought of as the band responsible for “Sister Christian.” However, they did give me an accidental moment of musical revenge one time, in a way I had not seen coming and never really enjoyed, because it put me in such a fear of parental consequences.
Back in my American Top 40 days (junior high), before I had any kind of a job, I only made enough money with my allowance to buy the occasional package of Star Wars trading cards and never bought music with any kind of exploratory feel. I pretty much had to know exactly what I’d get from an album before I’d even think about spending the $9.99 it would take. Because of this, I, like so many other kids from my generation, solved the problem by making mix tapes of my favorite songs off the radio. And what better source for finding the best songs of the moment than the weekly broadcast of American Top 40? I’d like to think that I would have put this plan together on my own eventually, but I’ll pass on the credit, once again, to my cousins the Carlsons, who made AT40 mix tapes habitually. In fact, I got my first information about the Birds and the Bees from eighth-or-ninth-grade John Carlson while traveling across South Dakota to the Black Hills. We were riding in the back of a camper-topped pick-up truck and listening to an American Top 40 mix tape he had brought along, and my fourth-or-fifth-grade self had asked what the Donna Summer song “Bad Girls” was about.
Listening to American Top 40 wasn’t just a casual experience for me, but usually a mission. I vigilantly paid attention, trying to delve clues from whatever Casey Kasem was saying about a song or an artist as he led into the next spot on the countdown. I mentally kept track of where my favorite songs were from week to week so I could make a fair prediction about when they might appear in the show, in case I still needed to get a recording of them for my collection. The game was to learn Casey’s speech patterns well enough so you could record as much of the song as possible without having to hear him talk over it, which also meant becoming familiar with the fraction of a second lag time between pressing play on the cassette recorder, knowing the best position for holding the tiny little microphone square up to the even tinier radio speaker, and holding my breath for three minutes straight to make sure there wasn’t any ambient noise added to the song. Most of the time it worked out pretty well. Most of the time.
One night I was hidden away in my bedroom having a fairly successful night of recording. The show was nearly over, and the Top 10 was dramatically counting down to one or two songs that had been back and forth between the number one position for weeks. I had a favorite between the two and I wish I could remember what it was — in all likelihood it was either REO Speedwagon or Hall and Oates, since both bands were nearly permanent residents of the Top 40 back then. Finally Casey cut to the chase, revealed the top song, and, since it had been the one I had been rooting for and I knew it was the one and only time during the entire week I could absolutely know for sure it would be played and I could record it, I pressed play and waited for the song to end as my finger rested on the STOP button with the caution of someone trying to defuse a thermonuclear weapon.
The song was half over when my bedroom door flew open. My dad stood there in the doorway with a big grin on his face and cried out in a comically overenthusiastic voice, “WHAT’S NUMBER ONE??”
My heart stopped.
I calmly pushed the stop button, slowly turned my head to lock eye contact with him and said, in the slowest burn of a voice I had ever dared use with my father before, “I was recording that.”
His eyes opened even wider and he quickly backed out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him as if that was going to make any difference at that point. Later on I heard from my mother that he had sheepishly walked into the kitchen with kind of a smile on his face and said to her, “Boy, if looks could kill.”
So anyway. Years upon years later I was in high school and had moved on from recording off the radio to buying my own vinyl, and Night Ranger, at that time, represented two titles: Their debut album “Dawn Patrol” — featuring the rock radio staple of the time “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” for the purists out there — and their more successful follow-up “Midnight Madness,” which featured the minor radio hit “You Can Still Rock in America” and the ultimate power ballad of all power ballads, “Sister Christian.”
There was a summer when everything my family did in one way revolved around a community theater production of “The Sound of Music.” Our cousin Sue was playing the lead as Maria, and ended up marrying her leading man Chuck. Erin had a big role in it as one of the Von Trapp children. Jenny had one or two minor roles, just on stage for moments at a time in different costumes, but still a part of the production. Even Dad was involved, playing the role of Baron Elberfeld in one scene, hamming up his one or two lines in what became a signature theatrical voice for him in the years to come as he appeared in a number of other community theater productions.
After the run ended and the summer was over, VHS copies of the play were made for everyone involved, and of course we had one, carefully labeled to make sure nobody accidentally used the tape to record some movie off cable. Several years later my parents hosted a casual dinner party, reuniting some friends involved with the play to watch it together in our basement.
Everything was going great. I was patiently sitting through a recording of a play I had sat through at least five times in person when someone suggested a break when we reached the intermission. Since even back then I was the unofficial tech support go-to in the house, I was asked to stop the tape until everyone was ready to continue. I did, and while everyone was out of the room doing whatever adults did upstairs during a VHS intermission in the mid-1980s, I started flipping through channels to see what else was on to watch while waiting for the crowd to reassemble. MTV would have been one of my go-to networks in high school so I went there first, finding a Night Ranger concert! And they were playing Sister Christian! So yeah, I watched it. Which was only part of the mistake.
As things turned out, I didn’t press stop on the VCR. Which didn’t become evident until everyone was back and I had to press play again, only to discover I had just recorded about five minutes of a Night Ranger concert right over the only VHS copy my family had of the play that three of them had been in. Erin didn’t really care. Jenny had probably been more annoyed by her younger brother pulling another idiot move than anything else, and might have even just labeled it as another of the typical idiot moves of which I was so frighteningly proficient.
Upon discovery, my first reaction, because I was in high school, was to try and think of a way I could finesse my way out of what had happened. That reaction didn’t hold though, because I recognized two truths in that moment: (1) I was unequivocally screwed, because my dad had loved everything about being in that play so much and for me to disgrace that artifact with one of those damned rock videos was tantamount to heresy. Even if it was done accidentally, the damage was done. (2) He was going to discover what happened in front of a room full of people he had invited to his house as guests. There simply was never going to be a better time for me to just come clean about what had happened. It was my only out.
I owned up to it, legitimately contrite. Sue’s now husband Chuck tried to lighten the blow by saying the part I’d recorded over had been boring anyway, which got some laughs and diffused the tension enough to watch the rest, which gave Dad the time to calm down before everyone went home. He was still royally pissed about it, but at least I wasn’t being blamed for anything other than a stupid mistake.
I never saw a connection between these two moments before I sat down to start writing about this, but now I see them as something approaching an almost Karmic parallel. I never would have erased any of the tape intentionally, just as I know Dad hadn’t meant to burst in on my American Top 40 recording session. Neither of us was happy with the end results, but neither of us could blame the other for what had happened.
So, I suppose what I’m saying as a summative statement is this:
Dad, I guess we’re even.
Back in my American Top 40 days (junior high), before I had any kind of a job, I only made enough money with my allowance to buy the occasional package of Star Wars trading cards and never bought music with any kind of exploratory feel. I pretty much had to know exactly what I’d get from an album before I’d even think about spending the $9.99 it would take. Because of this, I, like so many other kids from my generation, solved the problem by making mix tapes of my favorite songs off the radio. And what better source for finding the best songs of the moment than the weekly broadcast of American Top 40? I’d like to think that I would have put this plan together on my own eventually, but I’ll pass on the credit, once again, to my cousins the Carlsons, who made AT40 mix tapes habitually. In fact, I got my first information about the Birds and the Bees from eighth-or-ninth-grade John Carlson while traveling across South Dakota to the Black Hills. We were riding in the back of a camper-topped pick-up truck and listening to an American Top 40 mix tape he had brought along, and my fourth-or-fifth-grade self had asked what the Donna Summer song “Bad Girls” was about.
Listening to American Top 40 wasn’t just a casual experience for me, but usually a mission. I vigilantly paid attention, trying to delve clues from whatever Casey Kasem was saying about a song or an artist as he led into the next spot on the countdown. I mentally kept track of where my favorite songs were from week to week so I could make a fair prediction about when they might appear in the show, in case I still needed to get a recording of them for my collection. The game was to learn Casey’s speech patterns well enough so you could record as much of the song as possible without having to hear him talk over it, which also meant becoming familiar with the fraction of a second lag time between pressing play on the cassette recorder, knowing the best position for holding the tiny little microphone square up to the even tinier radio speaker, and holding my breath for three minutes straight to make sure there wasn’t any ambient noise added to the song. Most of the time it worked out pretty well. Most of the time.
One night I was hidden away in my bedroom having a fairly successful night of recording. The show was nearly over, and the Top 10 was dramatically counting down to one or two songs that had been back and forth between the number one position for weeks. I had a favorite between the two and I wish I could remember what it was — in all likelihood it was either REO Speedwagon or Hall and Oates, since both bands were nearly permanent residents of the Top 40 back then. Finally Casey cut to the chase, revealed the top song, and, since it had been the one I had been rooting for and I knew it was the one and only time during the entire week I could absolutely know for sure it would be played and I could record it, I pressed play and waited for the song to end as my finger rested on the STOP button with the caution of someone trying to defuse a thermonuclear weapon.
The song was half over when my bedroom door flew open. My dad stood there in the doorway with a big grin on his face and cried out in a comically overenthusiastic voice, “WHAT’S NUMBER ONE??”
My heart stopped.
I calmly pushed the stop button, slowly turned my head to lock eye contact with him and said, in the slowest burn of a voice I had ever dared use with my father before, “I was recording that.”
His eyes opened even wider and he quickly backed out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him as if that was going to make any difference at that point. Later on I heard from my mother that he had sheepishly walked into the kitchen with kind of a smile on his face and said to her, “Boy, if looks could kill.”
So anyway. Years upon years later I was in high school and had moved on from recording off the radio to buying my own vinyl, and Night Ranger, at that time, represented two titles: Their debut album “Dawn Patrol” — featuring the rock radio staple of the time “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” for the purists out there — and their more successful follow-up “Midnight Madness,” which featured the minor radio hit “You Can Still Rock in America” and the ultimate power ballad of all power ballads, “Sister Christian.”
There was a summer when everything my family did in one way revolved around a community theater production of “The Sound of Music.” Our cousin Sue was playing the lead as Maria, and ended up marrying her leading man Chuck. Erin had a big role in it as one of the Von Trapp children. Jenny had one or two minor roles, just on stage for moments at a time in different costumes, but still a part of the production. Even Dad was involved, playing the role of Baron Elberfeld in one scene, hamming up his one or two lines in what became a signature theatrical voice for him in the years to come as he appeared in a number of other community theater productions.
After the run ended and the summer was over, VHS copies of the play were made for everyone involved, and of course we had one, carefully labeled to make sure nobody accidentally used the tape to record some movie off cable. Several years later my parents hosted a casual dinner party, reuniting some friends involved with the play to watch it together in our basement.
Everything was going great. I was patiently sitting through a recording of a play I had sat through at least five times in person when someone suggested a break when we reached the intermission. Since even back then I was the unofficial tech support go-to in the house, I was asked to stop the tape until everyone was ready to continue. I did, and while everyone was out of the room doing whatever adults did upstairs during a VHS intermission in the mid-1980s, I started flipping through channels to see what else was on to watch while waiting for the crowd to reassemble. MTV would have been one of my go-to networks in high school so I went there first, finding a Night Ranger concert! And they were playing Sister Christian! So yeah, I watched it. Which was only part of the mistake.
As things turned out, I didn’t press stop on the VCR. Which didn’t become evident until everyone was back and I had to press play again, only to discover I had just recorded about five minutes of a Night Ranger concert right over the only VHS copy my family had of the play that three of them had been in. Erin didn’t really care. Jenny had probably been more annoyed by her younger brother pulling another idiot move than anything else, and might have even just labeled it as another of the typical idiot moves of which I was so frighteningly proficient.
Upon discovery, my first reaction, because I was in high school, was to try and think of a way I could finesse my way out of what had happened. That reaction didn’t hold though, because I recognized two truths in that moment: (1) I was unequivocally screwed, because my dad had loved everything about being in that play so much and for me to disgrace that artifact with one of those damned rock videos was tantamount to heresy. Even if it was done accidentally, the damage was done. (2) He was going to discover what happened in front of a room full of people he had invited to his house as guests. There simply was never going to be a better time for me to just come clean about what had happened. It was my only out.
I owned up to it, legitimately contrite. Sue’s now husband Chuck tried to lighten the blow by saying the part I’d recorded over had been boring anyway, which got some laughs and diffused the tension enough to watch the rest, which gave Dad the time to calm down before everyone went home. He was still royally pissed about it, but at least I wasn’t being blamed for anything other than a stupid mistake.
I never saw a connection between these two moments before I sat down to start writing about this, but now I see them as something approaching an almost Karmic parallel. I never would have erased any of the tape intentionally, just as I know Dad hadn’t meant to burst in on my American Top 40 recording session. Neither of us was happy with the end results, but neither of us could blame the other for what had happened.
So, I suppose what I’m saying as a summative statement is this:
Dad, I guess we’re even.
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