Kinetic Writer

It’s amazing how quickly the first soulful notes of R.E.M.’s “Drive” can throw me back to the early summer of 1993.

Their Automatic for the People CD had just arrived unrequested as the Columbia House auto-ship-of-the-month, and I called my best friend to ask if she thought I should keep the CD. She didn’t really have an opinion, but I decided to open and keep it while on the phone with her for whatever reasons I had as an almost-14-year-old about to enter high school that fall.

I sat at my desk and listened to the album all the way through that afternoon. I called my best friend again to tell her how great the album was and made her listen to some of the tracks over the phone. I moved to my bed so that I could lie back and close my eyes and absorb the pace, the beat, the feel of the music. I was captivated with my first listen.

Had the album come on a record instead of a CD, I probably would have worn it out from play within a year.

Automatic for the People remains one of my absolute favorite albums. It helped me grow from an insecure preteen who thought she had to listen to hip-hop to be popular into a teenager who discovered the joy of listening to music for personal pleasure. It helped me weather the tumultuous years to come and was a lifesaver when I was lonely and sad as an exchange student. As an adult, it provides a familiar comfort; it provides the power to help me relax or even to cry when I didn’t realize that I needed to cry.

It reminds me of watching the “Everybody Hurts” music video for the first time while staying with my now-deceased grandfather that summer of 1993. He and my step-grandmother let me play that CD in car, but not Violent Femmes.

“Nightswimming” reminds me of staying out all night with two friends on August 15, 1995 and jumping in the cold waters of Lake Erie in the early morning hours. Swimming away from the shore meant heading toward total darkness and the unknown. I was overcome by the peace of the quietly lapping water, the brightness of the stars against the black sky, and the bold courage that swelled inside me as I pushed out farther toward the invisible horizon. I returned to my friends and we rested on the small, rocky beach until dawn and watched a beautful sunrise together.

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon

One of the girls there was the same best friend whom I called about Automatic for the People two years before, though our friendship had been rough. We disconnected after that summer and never saw each other again after high school. I shared an important part of my life with her, and I often wonder what she’s doing now and how she’s been over the years. I could probably find out through mutual friends, but I’m hesitant. The joy and the pain of our friendship has been solidly planted in my head for so long that it’s become a precious part of who I am, who I was, who we were, and I’m afraid to take it out from behind the glass to risk changing it or breaking it.

It’s really amazing how all of that came flooding back to me with the first notes of a favorite album that I haven’t listened to in a while.

It was probably helped by the “oldest friend” writing prompt from Sunday Scribblings, which I check once in a while but haven’t really used as a writing tool. I guess until this week. “Oldest friend” could have meant an octogenarian friend or perhaps the first friend I remember as a child. Instead, it stirred up memories of the person whom I think was my first true friend… the girl who knew me best as I began to know myself, who broke my heart but couldn’t stop me from loving her even to this day.

I’ve had strong platonic friendships since, but I think that there’s a reason “coming of age” stories can be extraordinarily powerful. I never had a standard religious confirmation or mitzvah, but I experienced a personal transformation at that time which elevated my understanding of life and love for the years to come.

Any story that I write involving friendship at that age will most certainly be affected by my experience. And I think that listening to music from that time period will help me travel back to those emotions - using music as a catalyst for memory and mood is a good technique for my writing. I listened to Automatic for the People while wriitng this post and repeated “Nightswimming” a few times.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under good habits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.