Dec. 18: Let's get lost

Driving back from Cornwall tonight. Weather isn't great but not terrible either. A little snow. Slush on the streets. I've seen much worse. As per usual, I've got my iPod plugged in and on shuffle. On comes Amanda Marshall's Let's Get Lost. 

I switched songs immediately. It's not a song I can listen to anymore. It reminds me too much of the past - not really of a concrete memory but of a time radically different from now.

Livin' in the darkness, baby Comin' all undone It's been a cruel December, now we're prayin' for the sun By the time the storm rolls in, we could be long gone Baby, let's get lost 'til the days get long Just you and I 
 
So sings Amanda Marshall. Serendipity, perhaps, in that it was a cruel December and there was a storm rolling in tonight, but that song has always been a summer song for me. Just the title and Amanda Marshall's plaintive wailing. To me, that song is all "man life sucks right now and I've had a shitty week so let's just hop in the car and get lost. let's just drive. eat at a restaurant we've never been to before. go for a walk somewhere and just... I don't know... be young."

-

Whenever I hear the Tragically Hip, I always think of my brother. When he was in his late teens and early 20s, the Hip was pretty much the soundtrack of his life. He told me once that when he heard one particular song, it brought back a powerful memory of being on a road trip with a whole bunch of his friends, pulling into someone's hometown at some ungodly hour of the night. I envied that memory. I never had a whole bunch of friends to go road tripping with. I'm happy he was able to go get lost with his comrades and I wonder if the kids who were in that car with him are still part of his life.

-
 
So I guess that's what it is. Let's get lost reminds me too much of being young and, more specifically, the things I wish I did when I was young. 
 
But I should stop bitching. I'm a scant two weeks from my 52nd birthday, so I have at least a decade before I get to start drawing Old Age Security. I'm still relatively healthy, I don't have any health problems (though I have to get up at least twice a night to pee) and I'm still more than four months younger than Amanda Marshall, who can still get away with having that funky haircut.

So let's get lost.

And let it rain.



PS - I have seen Amanda Marshall in concert four times. Above is the front cover of her debut album, released in 1995 when she was about 22. Once, on Facebook, I asked her where the image was taken. She replied: "Lake Ontario." It is the only thing Amanda Marshall has ever said directly to me.
 
 
 
 

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