The Big Picture and the Closeup

Sometimes darkness makes the music more intense, especially music about things you can only see in the dark. This one is about that experience.

It had many of the aspects of perfection. Against odds, we found the time to get together, we had the double date, we played in the surf, we had two meals and lots of dancing and necking on the beach. And yet, in the end, it should have been more.

Of course there’s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then. I can picture sitting in Steve’s parents’ front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper. I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was.

But in the end I passed that test. After agonizing over it for a few days, I sent Cindy a letter telling as much of the truth as I could bear to tell.

All over my dorm I was hearing new things, or hearing old things in a new way. One of the most dramatic discoveries for me was courtesy of a guy a dorm block or two over who played the flute really, really well. I’m guessing I heard the sound of his instrument coming from his window, then traced it to the dorm room it came from, and, if memory serves, invited myself into his room.

Whatever I was thinking, and I swear I don’t know, the result was that my little musical contribution to the theatrical end product was to strip out any musical context for a racial argument largely couched in musical terms.

Around 1:30 on the Sunday morning, someone mishandled a cigarette near some combustible Christmas decorations. The ground floor was promptly engulfed in flames, which then quickly spread up the one stairway to the second floor. People on the second floor were trapped. Many jumped from the window, some were pushed from the window by frantic partygoers behind them …

However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.

The summer after my graduation was perfect. I wasn’t working; couldn’t find any. So I kept my own hours — noon to 3 a.m., working on the Great American High School Novel. Only problem: I really had nothing to say about high school. But I think my inchoate hope was that by making sense of it all through fiction, I could still get the girl to love me.

Those who were paying any kind of attention to Sgt. Pepper on that hot afternoon knew that they’d have to pay a lot more attention, later on, that we’d all have to listen to it several times to get out of it a reasonable helping of what the album had to offer. But hey, we had the time. That was the beauty of the moment for us. We had the time.