Recently I picked up Juliet from college after her junior year. We loaded up everything into the car and still had room for the two of us to drive home together, so that was good (smile).
I reflected as we pulled out of the campus on the ride home that we’d shared the year before. That ride was full of discussion about a lot of hopes and dreams that now had far exceeded those preliminary plans.
It had been a full year to say the least and one that included many exciting unexpected surprises. Not all of them were on her list of hopes and dreams but they were accomplished and finished and lived through nonetheless.
I am proud of her. Everything she has accomplished this year and every direction in which she’s set herself up for success is apparent and well-designed as she takes a well-deserved break before entering her senior finale.
We played her music in the car like we always do until, worn out and now somewhat carefree, she fell asleep and I switched over to an audiobook. As I did, my thoughts skipped backwards and slightly ahead of her state in life to the summer after my senior year of college.
I had originally decided to stay in the St. Louis area after graduation, but at the last moment I followed my instincts and my heart and I returned home to northern Illinois. Hopefully to write my novel and figure out my prospective opportunities without committing immediately to a job and rent in a city that my only attachment to was memories and a few friends who were sticking around or entering grad school.
At home I had the woods, my old cat, my old town and my longtime friends. I had some words under familiar rocks and roots.
That summer I kept my parents’ antique store open and I refinished furniture with dad. We went to auctions and sales and I invested what little money I had into small antiques and began flipping.
I mowed grandma’s lawn and had fried-egg sandwiches and Cherry Belle radishes with salt for lunch with her and I slipped back into weirdhome- town-life after high school. I kept a notebook and my small boombox with The Cure CDs and cassette tapes in the store and they were the soundtrack of that summer along with the Lime Spiders, Yaz and a few others.
I can still remember listening for sounds of cars and trucks on the highway that went past our property, it wasn’t that hard to know if someone was slowing down for the sign and then I’d hear the telltale crunch of gravel that meant they’d pulled into the drive. I’d switch off The Cure and turn the radio to WLS and the Cubs or something country out of Rockford and wait.
Fast forward back to driving between the Twin Cities and Cloquet while Juliet slept, my thoughts touched on futures, both of my past and of her tomorrows. Why? Well, because we’re both writers and back then, I wanted the same things that she wants now. Inspiration. Completion. Publication. Recognition. Screen plays. Movies. I didn’t want to direct, but she does. I wasn’t into film-making like she and her brother, Simon are. I am now, though.
I remember those months before I eventually got a job at NIU, I spent a lot of time trying to forge, to hammer out, to dig up and stitch together my novel aspirations. I spent a lot of time dwelling on lost love(s).
The problem was college. I’d just spent, to date, the best four years of my life and I’d become someone. I’d become who I was. I’d grown into myself. That self was different by leaps and bounds than who I’d been when I left in 1987. I was close to it and close to those I’d spent it with.
And yet… here I was, sleeping in my old bed, in my old house, not on my own, but in many ways back in my old shoes. I loved mom and dad, family. I loved the woods. I loved my friends. Not an issue. Never would be.
But the soundtrack was different. And unfortunately… The soundtrack wasn’t a cure. It was a link to a severed past that was pre-maturely truncated by what happens when those short four or five years are over. It, and one song in particular, held me under the boughs of The Forest, waiting. Staring at the Sea, Standing on a Beach. Not just metaphorically.
I still haven’t finished that novel that began that summer. The tides have come in and gone out and returned. I haven’t finished what may end up being two others, either, but I have definitely, unlike U2, found what I was looking for. More besides.
Now, beside me, sleeping in the car is only part of that unimagined, unexpected dream fulfillment. She’s a huge part. With dreams and soundtracks of her own.
Like for her siblings, I’ll continue to do everything within my power to make sure their dreams come true.
