Lately, I’ve been listening to music a lot more and with more intention. I have grown frustrated with the stupid algorithm and I’ve started making my own damn playlists again…sometimes on the fly, often with prompting from someone who casually mentions something I might enjoy listening to. Occasionally, I will dip my toe into music podcasts to figure out what everyone else is swimming in these days. Every once in a while, I’ll latch onto a random algorithmic miracle and go off on a tangent. But every spring, I revisit “Key Lime Pie.”
Since it’s been approximately 40 springs that this has been my ritual, certain memories and patterns emerge from this practice. I remember even the first spring. I believe I had either just turned 19 or 20, and I was experiencing the crashing and burning of what had been a (temporary) utopia. I could feel myself teetering on the edge of catastrophe, combined with needing to shake the winter blues. It was unseasonably warm in Chicago, and a sunny day walk was exactly what I needed. The things I saw on that walk are still visually implanted in my brain, as is the way the air smelled, and the particular quality of the sunlight. I can even feel the temperature of the still-cool air as I walked under the El tracks on Belmont, emerging, squinting, to be embraced by the warming sun.
I even remember the spring 10 years later, when I related this story to a depressed lover. I described the feeling of emerging into sunshine after the somber grey of winter and gasping at the stark beauty of it all. As we listened to Key Lime Pie together, he steepled my smaller fingers in his hand and told me I was his key lime pie. I loved him, but was secretly terrified of that responsibility, having lost a depressed friend to suicide 9 key lime pies ago.
Spring is that time of possibilities after the limitations and restrictions of winter have been removed. Camper Van Beethoven perfectly captures that feeling on this album. Particularly in one of my favorite stanzas of all time, from “June”:
And I wrote you this letter
’cause the clothes were hung on the line
And the crows flew out of the field and up into the sky
I’m lying here in the station
Stretching out on the tracks
Are all the possible places that I might arrive
Springtime reminds us that we can rebuild an entire world, even in the exhaustion of the aftermath of apocalypse. Even when, in the depths of the cold and the darkness, it felt like it would be forever before the sun would break through the clouds. Even if at times it felt like it never would.
I think of all of the other springtimes in my life, and all of the various (physical and metaphysical and existential and hypothetical) places I have arrived in every season of my life so far, and I can’t help but feel like a big old clumsy but faithful puppy, tongue-lollingly drunk on hope, tripping after butterflies and falling in love with tree trunks like all of the springtimes of my past in one endlessly looping filmstrip clacking through my brain like an old-timey projector.
Who needs heroes, when we have each other…and springtime.
P.S. If you haven’t seen the secret agent yet. I highly recommend. It’s a long fucking movie, but it is truly beautiful. And there’s that scene where Armando is driving with Fernando and talking about Fernando’s mother. Wagner somehow is able to convey that tightness of face, and the subtlety of false optimism and positivity that is so frequently required of parents who are experiencing adversity. You can see the almost-tears and feel the subtle catch in his voice. It’s quite lovely. It’s very artful acting.
Link
Only one link this week, as I’ve been busy herding turkeys around, listening to music, living in the past, and not reading so much news.
Oh yay. Yet another opportunity for politicians and their enablers to grift!
“The money flows well beyond large state agencies, to small and obscure agencies most people (including myself) have never heard of. The Point Comfort Police Department in Texas — a town of fewer than 700 people — has a base agreement of $167,525 to supply nine task force officers, plus an additional $5,000 salary modification. The Key Colony Beach Police Department in Florida is getting $119,000 for a single officer once you add its $107,500 base award to an $11,500 salary supplement. The Coward Police Department in South Carolina, also serving a town of roughly 700, has a base award of $107,520 for one officer, with another $15,000 modification layered on top.” – https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-ices-bounty-hunters?publication_id=7677&post_id=192048723
Musical Interlude
Camper Van Beethoven – Jack Ruby: https://youtu.be/-brixuki1kM?si=MB4dPwNei2SY87Rg
UnrulyMom.Com 