I think that everyone has one – the song. You know the one I mean,
The song that hit you as a young adult.
The one that you heard and it reached to the very bottom of your soul and made you cry.
THAT song!
The song that made you realize you were not alone.
I asked friends what their song was and I got some interesting responses.
Some I expected: Whitney Houston, Leonard Cohen, Alanis Morrisette.
Some I did not: Oingo Boingo, The B-52s, WHAM!
The list has some songs a lot of people might pick: Space Oddity, Cat’s In The Cradle, One Tin Soldier.
Then there was mine.
A some of you know, I grew up as a lonely nerd at a time when that was even less fashionable than it is now, This was before the Internet and before Twitter and before Marvel movies.
In addition, my home life with my mother meant that our family was isolated from the community as who wanted to be asked if their mother had had ANOTHER nervous breakdown lately and being asked by classmates who she was sleeping with this week.
My best friend from third grade, Herbie, even refused to have anything to do with me any longer after Mom’s latest adventure became known at school.
So, I was very isolated and lonely and depressed.
No – not depressed enough to end things but people would have understood, I think, if I had.
So, I spent my late elementary years hiding in the barn. I had created a sort of shelter in the old shed but Mom burned that down one night in a psychotic fit.
Under the hay in a corner of the hayloft were my magazines, some books and a transistor radio.
That transistor radio was a life saver. I would turn it up loud as I read “National Geographic” and the songs would echo from the rafters.
Radio stations were my friends:
WCOL!
WNCI!
QFM96!
I would get lost for a couple hours before I had to return to the chaos that was my home life.
After a particularly bad day where someone tried to beat up the nerd at school and having the principal refuse the do anything about it because it would entail making my mother come to school and he had had one too many run-ins with her, and then having my mother yell at me when I got home because the sky was blue, I fled to my sanctuary in the hayloft. I grabbed an Issac Asimov novel and turned on the radio.
I was at rock bottom…
That is when it started to play:
“Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend
I’ve come to talk with you again,”
My heart stopped! And then it slowly began again,
The song was resounding in MY soul and I did not know how to react as it continued to play.
It went on and on!
“Within the sound of silence”
Each verse dug deeper into me and cracks began to appear.
Someone else was out there who understood.
“Narrow streets I walked alone.”
NO! I now knew somebody else walked them with me!
I started to scream in pain, joy and release as the song crescendoed.
I WAS NOT ALONE!
“And echoed in the wells of silence…”
As the song ended, I knew there was someone else out there like me.
I would not give in!
I would take all that life threw at me and I would face it down!
I WOULD LIVE!
and, I have…
Thank you, Simon and Garfunkel.
Tales From An Old Ford 