The Music of Chance

When you get older you often find yourself living in the past. Memories are spun in the kaleidoscope and looked at from many different angles. As I do this, I often associate music that I was listening to or that was popular at the time with the memory. I am creating my own life’s soundtrack. This can be bittersweet at times and certainly directs your attention from more productive pursuits. But my ancestors were a morose lot at times, and the apple does not fall far from the tree. Here are a few bits of mine, truth and memory mixed to create a new past in a way.

It is 1983 and I am at a beach filled with large rolling sand dunes somewhere on the Jersey Shore. It is my summer break from college and I am 18 years old. I have taken and quit a summer job working at an inventory company, and I am playing poker at night to earn money. I am coming and going at an apartment with dozens of ever changing people for the summer. One weekend friends from High School drive down the parkway and spend a couple of days sprawled on a nearby beach. With them is a girl, Sarah, that I have known with since we were both eight years old. We were in many of the same classes as we grew up and often joked that we would get married one day. We dated at the end of High School but it was tentative, filled with the knowledge that we were headed for different schools in different States.

She is graceful and ethereal in her manner. That summer she is apprenticing for a ballet company in New York City, and I am happy that we finally seem to be moving towards a relationship. We have written each other clever letters and conducted long and painfully expensive pay phone calls up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In my head I can hear the song “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” by The Police every time I hear her lilting voice.

On the first morning I ignore my other friends and walk with her down the beach to the next town, several miles away. The sand is starched white and burns beneath my feet. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I can remember the feel of her hand in mine. She was a striking looking girl. Her eyes and hair the color of petrified wood. Many years later I would see these petrified eyes looking out at me from a program at a concert hall a thousand miles away. But on that day they looked at me and everything stopped. There was no sound, no indication that there was anything else in the world, but the two of us. We eventually arrived at a concession stand which sold dreadful hot dogs and semi cold beverages. My friend Mike, from the all night poker games, works there during the day. He makes us a few hot dogs and takes his lunch break and eats with us on benches which look out over the Atlantic Ocean. Mike is a sunny lad. Good at manipulating numbers he is much smarter than he appears. He is warm and friendly and could sell you anything had he the desire.

I go off looking for a bathroom. It takes me a while and almost 15 minutes pass. The Police song is still playing in my head. It has been a perfect morning really. The air feels crisper, the colors of things just a little sharper. As I walk down the beach towards them I can see that they are talking animatedly, their bodies leaning towards one another. A small voice of dread, an intuition as ancient as fire, tells me that they will end up together. I watch her looking at him once I get a little closer and I know I am right. I am always right it seems, that a burden unto itself. I greet them and Mike goes back to work and we walk back to the house. It is different now. Nothing is said and she is still friendly but I know she is thinking about him.

That evening I run into him at a party and he asks me about her. I know it is inevitable and do not fight it. I encourage him, and he wanders over to talk to her. He makes me a drink later and tells me he really likes her. I know how he feels.

It is two years later and they have sent me an invitation to their wedding. I am involved then with another girl. A complicated girl with violet eyes and a gift for irony. I send my regrets and a present but do not tell the new girl. How can she compete with a living ghost?

Five years later I am at an Irish bar in Nyack, New York. A small artsy town just across the Tappan Zee bridge from New York City. She is playing there with a band. A knee injury has ended her dream to be a ballerina but when one thing ends another can begin. She finds that her voice is pure and true, and on this day she is only months away from a record contract. I watch her sing from the back of the room. She is wonderful, and I am impressed. I don’t go up to the stage after the show. I leave through the back door and hope that I will only see her again in painful memories.

Some years later I see her name on a billboard. She is playing at a concert hall in Tampa. I show up and buy the program, but in the end I can not go in.

Her career runs its course. She has a child with Mike, and they move to New York City. He finds a fine job and the years fall away. I don’t think about them at all any more. In 2002, I buy a book about the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. It is a wrenching book; sad and beautiful. I find Mike’s name in its pages, one of many who were sent to oblivion that day. I finish the book but can’t remember anything I read. I play the Pogues on my CD player all night long and wait for the sun to rise again.

Some time ago a mutual friend sent me an email saying he ran into Sarah in the mountains of North Carolina. She was working as a tour guide. I thought about her walking amongst the oak and how the wood would match her eyes. He offered me her email address but I declined. The things I could have said two decades ago were part of a different song. I play Don McLean’s “American Pie” over and over, and think about the day the music died. I wallow for a while and then close that book and start the search for a new song.