Life with boys … is constantly evolving … this weekend, as we dropped off the boy at his dorm, we witnessed part of that evolution, and a peek at what will come … as he took charge of his space and his life in his own unique way …
So with an evening open we found ourselves at a Dave Matthews Band concert … it was not the first DMB show for either of us … but it felt different this time …
Maybe it was because, behind us, we could hear the hipsters with their man buns and full tattoo sleeves discussing the classic 90s oldies and the quality of sound on vinyl … but then and with a few simple notes, the music helped us shed the decades … and a pants size or three …
[The original Facebook post included a Dave Matthews Band lyric passage here.]
The music took us back to a time before … because there was a time before …
Back to the time when the idea of personal expression was a dolphin tattoo on the inside of the ankle … because we wanted to make sure we would not spoil the pictures of our weddings to men we had not yet even met …
The soundtrack of our youth was built one fake Columbia House account and thirteen CDs at a time … when we scoured liner notes for lyrics and hidden gems of information in a pre-Google world …
We were raised by a generation shaped by the hippie counterculture, who has somehow become a generation of unhip “Boomers” … We were a generation raised without car seats or helmets … We were taught to be colorblind and tolerant in a world that did not practice what it preached … we worried about nuclear bombs and AIDS with uniformed minds … we lived before Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook and somehow managed to survive …
And the songs played on … and we sang and danced and lost ourselves in memories … to the lyrics that have become part of our stories …
And then there were the songs we did not know … songs released when we were busy … busy drowning in seas of laundry, and paper, and expectations … when the soundtracks of our life were the theme songs to kids shows and dinner discussions about who and what qualifies as a superhero … but the music was still there … waiting …
And later as the lights rose, blinding us, and returning us to reality … and we saw the waves of humanity around us … we hoped like mad that vaccinations have been administered … witnessing a society that more closely resembles the inhabitants of the capital in the Hunger Games … and we once again noticed the masks looped around wrists and the hand sanitizers being liberally applied … we could hear the dings of Life 360 notifications letting us magically know where to find the ones we love …
And we know that we need to make choices … that trying to have it all will lead us to an unbalanced life … we have learned that something will have to give … Because as my Mom always said, “If you play, you will pay” … and we would pay in the morning with headaches, hangovers, and aching joints … but is it a price we are willing to pay … as we like ants go marching back into the unknown … with a song in our hearts and on our lips … and the knowledge that I am still in there … waiting to see what is next …
Leave a comment