I can’t get this song out of my head. Haunting to the point of disturbing; ‘so unkind, the pull of history’. The opening piano notes somehow take me back to a porch where I exorcised young, pure emotions with Signe Lund-Skabo’s Prelude**, dreaming I was a concert pianist. In Findlay, ‘dirge-like’ cello and violins slide in over the reverberating piano notes like a barge pushing up the Mississippi, adding a gravity-like heaviness. Eight-year old me laughs, can you spell it with no eyes? Can you see what’s going to happen as the wake of years roll over you?

There is a place in Iowa (Alta); in 1968 I began to learn about myself. I loved my friends and our family’s puppy and kittens and the mouse in the garage; I learned basketball from the boy across the street; I began scaling fences to get away from the discord of home. Like the singer I was already ‘scared but curious; raised up right but furious.’

I had several girlfriends; I held hands with one and played house with another. I learned to draw copying Garth Williams’ rich drawings of Laura Ingalls, desperately trying to stay still and quiet in class rooms where I was already bored beyond tolerance. I talked my mother into sewing me long skirts, wanting both to look like a hip late-60’s model and late-1800’s Laura. Achieving neither. I never dared to confide my desire and got her dream for me instead.

I rode a banana-seat bike with a yellow twist radio on the handle bars through humid sun and gravel dust, to share in the joy of new baby goats. My best friend and her sister still beam in black and white from the local paper clipping I kept, holding the twins with proud smiles.

1968. I had yet to kiss anyone, or fall in love except with the earnest loyalty of childhood’s adoration. I’ve read that girls begin to lose themselves around age 8 in modern American culture. I lost my grandmother in 1968, but didn’t learn to grieve. In the wake of loss, I began to bury pieces of myself, hiding away so the other kids wouldn’t mock me. As they had when I confessed ignorance of what a combine was for: not fitting in; daring to reveal difference.

1968. Emily and Amy weren’t quite old enough to feel the horrible pull of culture’s dictates but the song takes a memoirist’s license with time and memory to juxtapose the loss of innocence and the sweet scents of childhood. Perhaps the best way to excavate a life.

-*-*- credits -*-*-

*All quoted text from Findlay Ohio, 1968. Emily Saliers & Amy Ray, from One Lost Day, 2015, Vanguard Records.

** https://www.youtube.com/embed/YMl_v-KwPbs” target=”_blank”>Check it out …