Grueling day at work, must have put in 3 miles around the bench. ha.
My iPod reminded me how much I love the song American Pie, probably because it is so long.
I had vivid flashbacks of one late night in the dining hall with the kitchen staff at Camp 4echoes, standing on benches under the wagon wheel light fixtures singing that song at the top of our lungs. Because we knew all the words. Because it was late and we were 16. We had to be loud because everyone else was in bed and because it was finally dark. In the old lodge there were these dusty corners where the shadows would pass the afternoons when we would sit and sweat and will ourselves to feel cool. At night they would creep across the floors and spill out the single paned windows that were always open and roll across the lawn, under the starlight, down to the bay. If we were up to see that happen, and if we were alone then we owned the whole tableau. Now, it doesn't seem so strange that we were so into that song that summer. Who didn't want to be a "teenage broncin' buck with a pink carnation and a pickup truck"? We understood profoundly that "the half-time air was sweet perfume". None of us were born anywhere near to a time where we might have understood the whole significance of the lyrics but we thought we did. See that was our Kerouac and coffee shop summer were we came down with a case of 'too smart for our own good' that often infects high school kids, and it's a well known fact that everyone feels worldly at 16. We were so grown up then, not at all like I am now. And, American Pie seems like the kind of song that lends itself to dusty shadows. They tore down that lodge this past winter, bummer.
Bohemian Rhapsody occupies the same Long Song space in my brain. There was a canoe trip where both our party and the river ran out of water, we suffered group heat stroke and became marooned on a desert island with just that song and a deck of cards to occupy our minds. Thunder bolts and lightning...
