These Days by Stephanie

My iPod is on shuffle right now. I’ve been meaning to make more play lists and download more music. One of these days I’ll find the time. Maybe.

Right now Under My Thumb (The Rolling Stones) is playing. And as always when I play music (an addiction), I’m transported back to a distant time and place that still feels close. And so in this moment, I am 15. I am on New York City’s upper west side at the apartment of a congressman’s son. The congressman and his wife are out of town for the weekend, and their son, Billy, is throwing a party. I am there with about 50 “friends,” wearing the black mini skirt dotted with little yellow tulips (the one I sneaked out of the house in my Greek slouch bag since my father made me change to something more demure). I am wearing a yellow poor boy top and some strappy sandals that I bought at Chandler’s Shoes on Fifth Avenue (also spirited out in the slouch bag since the heels were too high for my father’s approval). My boyfriend’s band (Manchild in the Promised Land) is playing at the party. My boyfriend, Jimmy, is 17 and singing Under My Thumb, and strutting like Jagger. He has silky long black hair, and I am the envy of all the girls at the party. I am a curiosity as well since Jimmy is quite the “bad boy” and I am Sandy Ollson to his Danny Zuko. I don’t get the misogynistic lyrics of Under My Thumb. I am clueless, and totally smitten. He plays My Girl and points to me. And just as he finishes the song, the police come into the apartment with tear gas and we all scatter, running outside, a sea of tie-dye tumbling down small hills in Riverside Park, eyes burning. And with all that, I still get home in time for curfew. A few months later, Jimmy shipped off to Parris Island and then to Vietnam, and with fiction taking over 30 years older, I finished the story as it might have been, but wasn’t.

Now Mr. Chow (Acoustic Alchemy) is playing. I recall the jazz dance class when I first heard the gongs that begin the melody. It was shortly after the birth of my third child in 1987, significant because the two older kids were in the babysitting room and the infant was in the corner of the studio. At one point, I had to stop dancing to nurse him, watched the class sweeping, dipping, turning as I rocked back and forth with my infant. With Lay Lady Lay, I am in my bedroom at 17. It is my senior year of high school, and the song is a notably different Dylan. I am picturing myself going off to college, and wondering what kind of woman inspires a man like Dylan to write a true ballad…a love song. The Spinners are singing Could It Be I’m Falling in Love and I am back at The Forge, a nightclub in Miami. I am 22 years old, and I am dancing under a disco ball with my live-in boyfriend who wears a Nik Nik shirt opened halfway down his chest. My daiquiri (a departure from my typical beer) is back at our table. I love to dance, and I love the music, but I am wondering how my folksy flower-child self landed in Miami’s disco scene. I don’t know it, but soon I will be back in my hometown New York City with my 12-string, selling the jewelry that the boyfriend who became my first husband gave me, trying to make ends meet with a job that pays $98 per week and a rent that is $330 per month.

John Fogerty, Huey Lewis, and Jermaine Jackson are back-to back… how odd since they all sang to me and my kids in the 1980’s as I shuttled them to the town pool. Strains of Centerfield, Heart of Rock ’ Roll, and Do What You Do as I unloaded our folding beach chairs and bags filled with changes of clothing and snacks. The two older kids danced with knees bent and butts dropped as I swayed the baby on my hip, emptying the tailgate with one hand.

Here comes Galileo (Indigo Girls) played on my daughter Ellie’s mix as we drove the way back from Mt. Holyoke where she would go to college, and I can still feel the emotion well up inside me as I thought in just a few months I would no longer awaken her sleepy head with a kiss in the mornings…And shuffle now to Bombs Away (Bob Weir), the song I heard over and over again when I first dated my husband, and the lyric screamed out after years of lost loves “I guess I’m back in love again. Well hey and around we go…”

My husband and I don’t play enough music together anymore. He plugs in the iPod headphones on the subway, and we play music together on the rare occasions that we drive out of the city: I am the deejay surfing the iPod and he is the driver. Last weekend, on a trip to visit our kids for Mother’s Day, I played Johnny Mathis for him — oddly enough, How Do You Keep the Music Playing. For me, the drive became a musical odyssey, not just a road trip.

Here comes White Rabbit, so by the way, why do we watch the talking heads (yes, intended double entendre) on CNN after dinner, and listen to Larry King over Grace Slick? Where’s the generation who kissed, bopped, twisted, hustled, and slow-danced with arms slung around each other in a still-life embrace? Not that I want to go back to tear-gassed parties and tie dye. I just want to turn off the TV, crank up the iPod, and basically retrieve the time when melodies were a soundtrack for a less complicated life.

Nearly twenty-eight years ago when I walked down the aisle, bridesmaids in pink and lavender followed me. Except for a college friend, I knew none of them. Two were wives of my husband’s friends, one was someone I’d just met, and another was my husband’s sister whom I barely knew. As I look back, I barely knew my husband having dated him for merely a year before we married. The lavish wedding was not my choice. Having “just” had a wedding six years before in my parents garden, eloping was appealing, but Mark’s family understandably wanted a wedding for their son. Memories of the night are blurry. I was a bride in an odd re-run, and too young to protest without sounding unkind or petulant.

There was a table of my husband’s fraternity brothers and wives. The men (including my husband) started as 19 -year-olds at Northwestern, and became a true brotherhood. There are 14 of “us” now with Mark and I as the last to marry, and children, and even grandchildren.

One of the daughters was married in Savannah last weekend,  the first time I have been among the crowd bringing it to 14.

Hard to believe we have children who are marrying. Wasn’t it just yesterday that Mark and I exchanged vows? And wasn’t it just yesterday that I believed in all the promises the young bride and groom made last weekend?

At first, Savannah was not the place for me to be. The Universe tested my will as I walked the city streets adorned with filigree balconies and trees dripping with Spanish moss, inhaled the sweet scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, heard the honk of the river boats, the street musicians playing the blues on clarinets…It was all too redolent of New Orleans and Mississippi where my husband spent all too much time in 2004 when he took a marital leave of absence.

I always longed to know and be known by these 12 people who were so connected to my husband. Until this weekend, I never had the opportunity. I was, unintentionally, the outsider. When we were younger, there were celebrations and reunions that I couldn’t attend. Whereas others had families with whom they could leave their children, we did not. And our children, born in stair steps, were not portable enough to cart to different parts of the country. I stayed behind as Mark went off to bar and bat mitzvahs with his friends whose children were brought up in traditional Jewish homes  unlike ours. I am somewhat of a mutt, and Mark did not feel a pull to his roots. In addition to my absence from events over the years, I had a self-conscious feeling from the moment the group celebrated our wedding at New York City’s upscale Pierre Hotel in 1981 that I was mis-perceived as a “Park Avenue chick,” not to mention a divorcee. Over the years, Mark came home with wonderful stories after the reunions, my absence further sealing my sense of being a stranger. I envied their unity, and hoped I wasn’t misunderstood.

It hurt silently. However, I was taught stoicism, buckling down, and pulling myself together even when the world felt like it was crashing around me.

I didn’t know what to pack for the Savannah weekend…how to fit in with my Bohemian wardrobe, long and beaded earrings, too-high heels. I packed enough to stay a month, fearing judgment, practicing holding my head high as I guessed their secrets about 2004 locked in the brotherhood. Yet on the heels of my mother’s death, I looked forward to a new beginning.

On Thursday night as the group trickled in, we found a bar by the river, drank shots of tequila (something I hadn’t done since college!), and even sang karaoke. One of the wives, in particular, was my companion that night. Did she realize how grateful I was to be “let in?”

On Friday, I barely awakened, head pounding, my thoughts groaning, “Now I look like a lush.” Mark and his pals were already on the golf course. Enough water and Advil got me out the door in search of a yoga studio where I might detoxify. As I stood on the corner, a voice called from across the street. I turned. She waved: Another one of the wives.

“How do you feel?”

“Like crap,” I said.

She laughed. “I wanted to call you, but I didn’t have your number. Let’s walk.”

The pounding in my head left as we walked the old streets of Savannah for hours, talking about everything that women talk about, with me forgetting the negative olfactory inferences of jasmine and honeysuckle. The next day, 12 of us (the bride’s parents were occupied) hopped a trolley tour, but my tequila companion and her husband bailed with Mark and me, and we four walked and shopped the streets, landing at Tubby’s Tankhouse around 3 p.m. where Mark and his friend drank beers and watched sports, and my new friend and I talked about everything from mothers to marriage to religion to how much we loved Italy and wouldn’t it be great if we could all go to Venice one day. And then the bunch who stayed with the trolley found us, and we stayed until it was time to dress for the wedding.

As Mark’s wife for nearly 28 years, and by the end of the weekend, I was embraced by a group I’ve longed to join and embraced them right back with nearly three decades merely a blip on the time line.

Perhaps I am too sentimental as I revel in the friendships made last weekend. During the post-wedding dinner, I had a bad moment. It was all those wedding vows, the recent loss of my mother, the near loss of my marriage…it all suddenly blind-sided me. I took my wine to a veranda with my “tequila partner” who read my mind, “You know,” she said, “all marriages go through rough times.” Simple soothing words evoking a sensation absent in my emotional history where I am always the one to buck up and care for others.

On the plane home, Mark didn’t read the periodicals stuffed into his briefcase as he typically does. And sloughing the beliefs ingrained since childhood, I bared my soul about the clarinets, the scent of honeysuckle and fried seafood, and the honk of the ferryboats…how they nearly drove me mad until my new women friends made me feel a part of this “family.”

I am making changes, speaking my mind fearlessly without belaboring, shedding armor and opening myself shamelessly to comfort, admitting that hurting is not weakness.

Can it be that timing in life truly is everything?