(Re) Run Back in Time

As soon as today’s song started playing I knew this post was going to be a re-run. The album Ten by Pearl Jam came out in the summer of 1991, just after I graduated high school and long before I started college. Though if I’d gone away to college that fall like most of my friends had I’m sure I would have taken a shine to the album a lot sooner. I was still shedding myself of my pop princess roots and hadn’t yet jumped into the grunge pool.

Sometime over the following eighteen months I started listening to the album and in June of 1993 when I moved in with Keith on Williams Street it became a regular album in our (widely varied musical taste) rotation.

There are very few songs on Ten that don’t remind me of this time in my life at my place on Williams Street – the poo brown wall-to-wall carpet, the tub that always backed up, the cool little niche where Keith had his desk, our hand-me-down living room furniture, the party where Michelle sang and that Keith tape recorded the entire night (which I still have somewhere, believe it!), those flowered curtains in the kitchen. But I’ve already written a pretty great post about those days.

Just click on over to Williams Street for the full story.

May’s Month of Music

Jeremy – Pearl Jam (Pandora first track)

All You Need Is a Light Jacket

Some of you will recognize the reference in the title, and those who do will understand that although I’m not specifically picking April 25th as my day four selection, I am trying to think outside the confines of how it reads. Because, like I thought when reading the list initially and Bridgete said yesterday, how on earth could I pick just one?

Today’s photographic selection is:
A picture of your favorite night

So am I really supposed to look back over time and pick a night, just one, that was the most amazing and significant night of my life? If so how could I honestly rate one above the other?

My wedding was pretty fracking awesome.
• But was it really better than the night I got to celebrate (miraculously) graduating from high school?
• The first night I spent, born, on this planet?
• The first time I had sex?
• A random Sunday on a road trip while laughing hysterically?
• That night I got the ‘all clear’ call from my BFF about the C word?
• The time when I was fortunate enough to be invited on a free trip to Disney and got to go on some of the park’s most awesome rides after dark, with just our group and no one else, then ate a catered and served fancy dinner inside the ride?
• The party at my very first apartment?
• The one and only time I made alternate for the gymnastics League Meet?
• When I saw Jason Mraz with no more than 100 people in NYC, he was still a “nobody”, and I was about 20 feet from the stage when someone yelled at him “have my Asian baby” and despite his obvious end of tour exhaustion he laughed out loud?
• Any of the 3rd of July’s in Humarock?
• The one and only time I ever bet on sports and won $1000?
• The first time I was ever put 'on the list' at the door of a club?
• The night I let my friend’s now ex do up my bleach blonde hair in the most insanely freaky style ever then went out to dance in Raleigh (stone cold sober because I was the DD) and took home an Army brat that I didn’t sleep with?
• The time I saw Joey McIntyre at the Hatch Shell, wrote about the show, pitched it to a local radio station and was subsequently published for the first time?
• Every single night because Matt and I cuddle up and snuggle before falling asleep?
• When I won tickets on the radio to go see Bryan Adams back in the 80’s and my sister and I had my dad take us to Worcester where just the two of us got to see the show from like the second row of the first balcony?
• My grampa Ed’s funeral after party? (No judgment people, we’re Irish so the funeral party is almost as big a celebration of life as a birth, wedding, random Tuesday…)
• The night we were the only Americans in a semi-secret club in Amsterdam because I happened to tip the girl serving me coffee and simply asked where was cool to go dance?
• The first time Matt asked me out (and then I made him wait approximately 1000 more nights before saying yes) when he carried me on his back out of the club (sober) and we realized we had way too much in common as we stayed up almost all night talking over coffee at Bickford’s in Woburn?
• Every single night of my almost 38 years on this planet?

Whew, that’s a tall order!

So I’m not going to pick a night from my past, I’m not going to pick a night of the week either. Instead I’m just going to pick my favorite Night -- "Starry Night" by my all time favorite painter Vincent van Gogh.

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Catch up on anything you missed  30 Photos, 30 Days
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Williams Street

When I was almost twenty years old my life had come to an interesting impasse and I was forced to make a few very difficult decisions in a relatively quick time frame. As I look back on those days now I do nothing more than chuckle, grin slyly and thank whatever greater force brought all of those experiences into my life because I would in no way be where I am now without having had them.

Just a couple days before my birthday in June of that year, my mom kicked me out of the house. In the six or so months prior to that day, many things in my life had changed and that moment was the proverbial straw everyone talks about; the world seemed to cave in and then explode back outward as if an entirely new universe was born. And it was. Life seemed to check and balance itself in a most peculiar way; intertwining moments one might call fate.

I was going to college full time back then and working part time at a record store while I lived at home. A few of my friends and I were commuting everyday to a community college in the area, working towards our Associates degrees (which we all planned to apply towards a Bachelors at the four year university of our choice upon completion). School and I were never ideal bedfellows so I felt uncomfortable most of the time I was there despite the 3.8 GPA I was carrying. I had no idea what I wanted to do however so college appeared to be the only way to go. Hell, everyone else was doing it. Everyone I knew went to school the fall following graduation but I waited until the following January to start since I was so unsure about going at all; I only made it through three semesters, and only two with that killer grade point average, as the following year everything changed.

My grandfather passed away late winter the following year and it affected me hard because he was the first of my grandparents to have died. He had suffered the effects of Alzheimer’s and since it was my first experience with the disease I had no idea what it was all about; it saddened me that he no longer had any idea who I was and I felt uncomfortable visiting him at the nursing home because of it. Around the same time frame a very close friend of mine joined the Army and although Desert Storm was over, I was extremely nervous for him (sadly the Army effected him so much that he was never the same jovial guy he had been before joining). In addition to both of these things I was seeing someone who even I knew I should not have been with.

After my grandfather passed away, my school work started to suffer; I withdrew from a couple classes and those I decided to stay in I dedicated little or no time to. I wanted to get out and live, to remember that I was a young person, to have fun. I met some fantastically spirited people and began what would be many years of drifter partying. Some of these people came attached to my then boyfriend, some to the collegiate experience and some I have no recollection how they came to be but boy was I glad they showed up.

Once my grades plummeted that was pretty much the end of living at home, my mom gave me two days to leave. Happy birthday to me. My aunt let me crash for a week while I frantically tried to find somewhere I could afford to live on my tiny paycheck.

I have absolutely no idea how we had met, if we knew someone in common, or why either of us were even at the school the day we chatted since it was summer break but for some reason right around this time period, Roomie-to-be came into my life. I distinctly remember sitting on the radiator in the hallway between the cafeteria building and the courtyard as we discussed the fact that he was looking for a roommate and the rent was $200. Even on my teeny salary I knew that was a doable figure and within a week I was moving the small number of items I had into the second bedroom of Williams Street.

Roomie was an energetic guy and always full of humor and life. We clicked instantly because we were both just crazy enough to be normal; on some freakish cosmic level I think we knew we had to be friends. He was a great friend who put up with my (to put it kindly) less than stellar boyfriend, crazy friends, polar opposite musical taste, late rent payments and complete distaste for washing dishes but he never, and I mean never, judged me for it. Well at least not to my face.

From the outside, the house was just like any other house in Arlington -- single family, colonial style box with brown siding and concrete stairs -- but inside that house memories were made that never in my life will I ever forget. Then again I may have already forgotten most of them, since it was my first apartment with an older roommate and I was just about to enter my twenties -- that place was party central.

If someone passed by the house on a Friday night and there was not a party going on it may have made them question who was sick or out of town. In fact that question could have occurred on any random night of the week that the cops didn’t knock to tell us to turn the music down. There was always someone there, something going on. The best times though were the ones when after a crazy night of partying everyone had passed out wherever they fell but Roomie and I (and frequently my sister and a few other very close friends) would have made it through the whole night so we chatted quietly with a cup of coffee as the sun came up and we watched it rise through the big bay window with the blue curtains. The one that always had that “keep winter out” plastic attached to it. Of course just like anything, it was never meant to last forever.

Since that time I have lived with a lot of people, some romantically, some as roommates, as well as in a few places on my own and now with Matt, but there was something so completely magical about my first place out of my mom’s house that none of the other situations since have been able to come close to matching. After about a year with Roomie I ended up getting work as a live in nanny and moved out of Arlington and into a room in the family’s house. In an almost symbolic act, the Williams Street house was sold and the new owners tore it down to build a monstrous McMansion duplex. I am glad that the times there will never be able to be replaced and that the house as it was back then will live on in my memory through photographs never fit to print.