Music has always been part of my life: a blessing; a balm; sometimes a curse. A local radio station pretentiously calls Baby Boomer classics “the soundtrack of our lives.” The pieces that have augmented my existence are less well-known: the B sides; the obscure tunes once heard only on late night radio, nurturing our ears and caressing our souls.
One of those songs is “Triad”, from Jefferson Airplane’s album Crown of Creation. It begins with two acoustic guitar chords, inevitably triggering this memory. Cue up the track here before you read further.
Summer 1975. I see my 12th floor dorm room at the University of Illinois. There is no one else around—they’ve left for the summer—and even I’m not there. The lamp on my desk provides warm but incomplete illumination. Out of the window, in the west, I see the street lights along Florida Avenue and the silhouette of the Assembly Hall, a giant, concrete flying saucer just south of Memorial Stadium. Beyond that, in the darkness, a slowly pulsating red light on a distant transmission tower.
The second guitar comes in with a haunting melody and the scene fades to midday along a long, straight stretch of two-lane blacktop. A lonely FINA gas station sits on south side, along the edge of the cornfields. A railroad track runs parallel to the highway on the north side. The road disappears into the heat waves rising in the distance. It could be any two-lane anywhere on the prairie, but this is U.S. 36 between Decatur and Springfield. I’m going to meet my girlfriend’s parents with a mix of anticipation and fear.
You want to know how it will be
Me and her, or you and me.
Her family lives in a tired, Depression-era house with Frank Lloyd Wright moldings on the upper window panes that have been painted over several times.. Her father is an alcoholic whose mind is now that of a prize fighter punched in the head one time too many. He greets me with a grunt, trying to be cordial, but won’t look me in the eye. Her mother is a woman with black hair whom I could imagine in years past wearing one of those frilly 1950s aprons with an old, heavy stainless-steel iron with the black plastic handle and the braided cord with the round plug, smiling while ironing the laundry, a regular Suzy Homemaker. But her face is taut, having been hardened by a life she would not have deliberately chosen. It was her lot and she stayed with it. That’s what you did back then.
Her father doesn’t like me because I’m the wrong color. “Why couldn’t you have found a nice white boy?” he asked her after I left. Her mother doesn’t like me because we’re sleeping together. “I don’t like how you live,” is how she framed it. It doesn’t matter that I’m planning on going to medical school. I declare my love and devotion to her daughter but she seems to know better. Later I will contemplate awkward holiday family gatherings and realize she is right. Despite that, she sincerely thanked me when I called a few years later to let her know her daughter’s tonsillectomy went well.
Your mother’s ghost stands at your shoulder
Face like ice — a little bit colder
Saying to you — “you cannot do that, it breaks
All the rules you learned in school.”
I ask her to marry me during my first year in medical school and give her my mother’s old engagement ring, the one my father, long deceased, gave her. She picks out a wedding dress and models it for me. It truly is a fairy tale, but I am totally incapable of keeping the promise I’ve made. I’ve not yet confronted my own demons and will betray her. Through tears of anger and unspeakable pain she will rage, “You had yourself a virgin!”
Did we love each other? Or were we just looking for the love and affirmation missing from both our lives?
Four decades later, in the shadow of my eventual mortality, the guilt surprises me and I try to atone for the sins of my youth. I am not alone. Others have confessed their own transgressions to me – relationships condemned by immaturity, selfishness or fate. We all seek absolution but there are no do-overs in life, no path to penance. We can only acknowledge our trespasses against others and move on.
I’ve thought of apologizing to her, but would I be doing it for her or for me? I will never know. for some things are best left undisturbed.