Boy meets girl. While leaving girl's room one night, boy turns her alarm clock to the college radio station, on which he is an early morning DJ. The next morning, when her alarm goes off unexpectedly early, there he is, on the radio, dedicating a song to her: "The One I Love" by R.E.M.
"This one goes out to the one I love" is the chorus, in case you're not as well indoctrinated in the catalogue of R.E.M. songs as I am, being the child of that particular boy-meets-girl.
Yes, these were my parents, and that is one of the least nauseating stories of their college romance-turned-marriage. Those terrorists. Even more terrifying though is that it's been nearly 20 years since their 13 years of marriage ended almost 30 years in total have gone by and my dad is still listening to R.E.M.
My father's taste in music is like that mosquito frozen in the amber in Jurassic Park, from which they extrapolate an entire world of pseudo time-travel. He still listens exclusively to mid-eighties alt-rock, precisely the music he listened to when he was in college: R.E.M., the Violent Femmes, Jonathan Richman.
He has briefly entertained affinities for Wilco and Modest Mouse and most of the bands I try to foist upon him, but he always returns to R.E.M. and his favorites from the past.
Listening objectively to R.E.M. vs. Beirut, or the Violent Femmes vs. Modest Mouse, I've come to the conclusion that it's not the quality of music that's declined. It's my father's quality of life.
Sorry to lay it out there like this Dad, but what you're nostalgic for is not a time when music was inherently better, but a time when you're life was inherently more fun.
I fear this is something we've all begun to experience. I already find myself returning to songs from freshmen or sophomore year with a particularly maudlin reverence. Fast forward 30 years and I fear I will be admonishing my own adorable child-terrors: "MGMT! Now that was real music!"
Either that, or bleeding out in a gold-plated bathtub in Dubai.
That's the thing: Nostalgia, to which I am particularly susceptible, can become idolatry; dangerous and calcifying. Can we all agree to watch each other's backs? Let's not be bugs in the amber before it's absolutely necessary.
This past Thanksgiving, I brought two ravenous friends from Dartmouth to my father's home in Maine. My parents as I said, are divorced but remain close, and my mother cruised by in her party dress for dessert. Dad scampered upstairs to fetch her a book he'd been meaning to give her. She was done up more beautifully than usual; intentional, I'm sure. On the way back to Dartmouth my friends said it seemed obvious to them that my father is still in love with my mother.
I know though, after years of watching them, that this isn't the case. What might make it appear to be so, to my friends or anyone else, is simply that he is in love with that time in his life that she represents: College, youth, the future still undetermined and mistakes yet unmade.
Ugh. Hello, Class of 2010. The thing is, many of us are enacting small-scale versions of this narrative (but for some of us I feel a blink of the eye is all that stands between the 30 year flash-forward). For all our "last chance" trumpery, many of us are actually rekindling old flames, or speciously guarding sacred ones. I remember this disappointment distinctly from freshmen Spring: All those seniors I thought would be shamelessly on the prowl turned out to be hung up on some epic love from their past years.
I was skeptical then, and I'm skeptical now. Do you really believe they're "The One," or are they simply the one who has meant the most, so far? If the answer is the latter, well, maybe you should let them go gentle into that good basement.
Because we are still very, very young. And because honestly, you can't tell me that this underground existence will really turn out to be "the best days of our life."
Being 32 and crystalline in New York will be far more fantastic; and 46, cryogenic in Paris will be better still. We will meet people to buy us happiness, and in the half-light of the chandeliers, we won't look a day past 26.
At least, this is what I have to tell my heart of darkest hearts, to keep it trucking, and this we know will probably go down that gold-plated drain in Dubai with the rest of my incarnadine bullshit.
I've said it before, and now I've said it again: My current horrific mood is (a) a mood swing from the percocets I've been taking since they ripped my wisdom teeth out of my head, or (b) just the natural atrophy of staying in a place too long.
There are no more eligible bachelors here! There are only history books. I do not care to do the reading. And I see no point in playing Lazarus with deservedly dead relationships, and I see no point in pretending that our college loves, actually more edifice than fun, are really worth fighting for.
I, for one, surrender. This column makes no sense, this place is beautiful but not forever, let's seize our last chances, really, and just keep in mind that they are not, in fact, our last. Okay?
My Dad was an idiot when he played that song on the radio for my mother. He either ignored the words completely, or had already forgotten them. The chorus goes "This one goes out to the one I love" but the next line is: "This one goes out to the one I left behind."
Who wants a painkiller.
