“I know I’m not a hopeless case.” – U2, “Beautiful Day”
I’m six (and I’m also four, eight and nine), and I’m squeezed between the boys in the back of Dad’s car. I’m nervous, in the way one can only be for six-year old soccer (and four-year old, eight-year old and nine-year old soccer.) But a sound is slicing through my focus, and although I’m staring intently at my knobby, scraped knees, I’m feeling the melody cut into my body in an undeniably moving way. It’s the favorite sound of every six-year old (and four-year old, eight-year old and nine-year old): Bono’s voice, crooning on the “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” album.
There is an established routine, and we don’t stray from it: every Saturday morning, we bop our way over to Evans Field listening to “Beautiful Day,” and “Elevation,” by everyone’s favorite Irish rock band.
I’m not singing along. I’m nervous, so I can’t. But I’m listening, I’m listening intently. I can feel the music, I can feel his voice, I can feel the words. (I was young, but I learned to love words young.) I can feel it, and it’s working, it’s working, it’s working. U2 is, indeed, helping to make me emotional enough to undertake an in-house soccer game with all the energy and feistiness I can muster.
We skip track two on the record. Too mellow.
“That’s not a song meant to listen to before a game. That’s a driving home song,” Dad says.
***
“The years go by, and time just seems to fly.” – Daughtry, “September”
It’s a different car now. Mom’s driving, not Dad, and the boys and I have more room to spread out in the silver minivan, the soccer family cliché, rolling down the street. Music is always playing on the radio. Mom is always singing.
“I’m not ready for school to start yet,” I’m thinking. “I’ll miss these summer days. I’ll miss this summer.”
Who wouldn’t? These summer days in the 2000s are boring, fun, and sweet, and slow and all too fast, and although we look forward to them each year, they’re never quite the same as they were last year.
This song feels a bit like one of us is reading “Harry Potter,” in the back of the van and the texture of that plastic wiffle ball bat. I’m looking out the window in the way all young kids do (in the way that we all should.) I like this song a lot, I decide. It makes me feel a little sad.
Mom cries on the last day of school and on the first. I pretend not to understand. I scoff, but I know. I feel that too, that melancholia, that confusing feeling of the freedom of another summer and the quiet sadness of another school year gone already. I’m a year older, and so is she. Already, I’m feeling the irrevocable pull of the years.
***
“I don’t want this feeling to go away. Please don’t go away. Is this how it’s supposed to be?” – Jack Johnson, “Upside Down”
I stayed home from school sick today, but by the time Dad gets home from work, I’m feeling well enough to shoot hoops with the mini basketball in the living room. The “Curious George” movie CD is playing from my pink Barbie CD player.
He kisses my forehead. “It’s good to see you’re feeling better.”
I certainly am. But what is this beautiful song on right now? Why is it pulling at my heart? It ought to be illegal for a song with such a haunting ending to exist on the damn “Curious George” film soundtrack of all places. Hell, no wonder I grew up obsessed with music and nostalgia.
I shoot another hoop.
***
“Come, we finally cry, oh, and we don it.” – Bon Iver, “Wash”
Where am I now? I’m 21, and I’m looking at a particular cluster of pine trees in the hills of Austria. There’s one tiny note, this one damn note, in the Bon Iver song right at 3:01, and I’m on the verge of tears. That one note, that little note, is sending me flying through the air to a very similar cluster of trees in my grandmother’s backyard in Pennsylvania. I’m getting flashes now — this is becoming blurry — and it sounds like Bob Ross drawing similar trees, and also the dark green, almost blue, hue of the trees on the cover of that book I loved, “The Blue Castle.”
What is the link here? Why am I almost in tears? How is it all connected? Oh yes, yes — it’s coming together now. I watched Bob Ross at Grandma’s and read “The Blue Castle” at Grandma’s, and I spent many days, which melted into years, quietly admiring the stillness of those pines in her quiet, soft yard. And I must have listened to this note there too.
My God, it’s an impressive note, sending me to Pennsylvania and Austria, and 17 years ago, and 97 years ago and back again all in one hazy, beautiful sound.
***
“Weightlessness, no gravity. Were we somewhere in between?” – Gregory Alan Isakov, “San Luis”
A shuffled song can be a dangerous song. I only let this one play for a few moments because it takes me to that first college winter, and it has a taste to it. It tastes like loneliness and cold hands and long walks and dining hall dinners and riding that fine line between unhappiness, and hanging in there and I don’t think I want to listen to this song anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore.
I press skip.
***
“I’m going to miss it when it’s over.” – Alessia Cara, “October”
We, my roommate and I, are both putting on makeup in our little shared bedroom. It’s a college apartment with pictures taped to the wall and inside jokes written on the refrigerator, and an oven so small that people laugh when they see it. But we love it; it’s ours, at least for a little.
It feels like we just did this last night because we did. But I’ve come to love this little ritual we have, laughing, and primping and singing our way through the early evening, realizing that we can do this many, many times, and enjoy it nearly every time. Still one day, it’ll have to be our last.
That doesn’t matter right now though. Not when you’re spending your weeks laughing harder and more than you ever thought possible.
“I’m gonna miss this when it’s over,” I sing quietly under my breath, mirroring the lyrics coming from her speaker in the other room, carefully applying mascara with my fake-tanned hand.
I pop the mascara brush back into its tube.
“Are you feeling it?” I ask her.
***
“Believe in me. ‘Cause I don’t believe in anything.” – Counting Crows, “Mr Jones”
The really impressive moments of this musical time travel is when I’m suddenly dropped off in a place I never was.
I hear “Mr. Jones,” by Counting Crows, and it’s instant. I’m on the front porch of a college house, drinking beer in the warm spring days of 1997. The fact that I wasn’t born until 2001 suddenly doesn’t seem to matter. Or I hear Jim Croce’s earnest storytelling, and I’m drinking coffee at a diner in Michigan in the winter of 1974. It’s a merry-go-round, switching its song every few moments, twirling me through my past, others’ past, scenes and glimpses and emotions and the loveliest little gut punches. And, though the sound is coming through my ears, it’s all just happening inside my head. I can’t quite reach it.
How comforting is it that music can transport us like that?
How heartbreaking that we can’t really go back in time?
***
It’s August, again.
I’m not sure what year it is — maybe 2007 or 2008. There’s a golden nostalgia in the kitchen that only exists in August. The one that only exists when you’re young enough to revel in it and old enough to realize the particular beauty of these moments — the moments in which Mom is calmly serving pasta, Dan and Dad can’t stop laughing from Dad’s wit, and I’m soaking it in. Feeling the slight ache in my chest already, feeling at this young age the lovely ache that will come to define so much of my life. The ache that says, “My God, this is something. Can’t we stay here forever? Can’t we just stay a little longer?”
I’m transported to this dinner table particularly when I hear Sting albums and the “Home” record by Simply Red.
(Thank God my parents exposed us to such rich, gorgeous, moving music at a young age. Thank God my parents have given me such loveliness to look back on. Thank God I don’t need to skip many songs.)
“Remember this,” I’m thinking to myself.
The low sun drenches the kitchen in such a pretty light.
Kate is a senior majoring in public relations and minoring in English, history and digital media trends and analytics. She has had a love for words from a very young age. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys having dance parties with her friends, exercising, talking about the swift passage of time and listening to a wide variety of music.