I thought I was in love when I was sixteen. Her name was Bonnie. She was twenty-two and the manager of Papa Gino’s, which sat across the hall from where I worked. I spent every break there, trying to work up the nerve to say something to her. Talking to girls wasn’t easy for me. Talking to a pretty woman made it even worse.
Bonnie came over one day while I was flipping through the song selection on the tabletop jukebox.
“What song are you picking?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, heart pounding. I was going to pick Van Halen’s version of “Happy Trails” but I wasn’t going to tell her that. The song was fun, but it wasn’t cool.
“I was going to pick ‘Pretty Woman’,” I said.
“Good choice.” She winked.
Yes. I was in love.
There was only ever one “date”. We went out to eat at a local restaurant, and I bought my first underage beer. I was nervous as hell and the beer helped.
I knew there was no future that contained a version of us together. I played “Young Boy Blues” one afternoon after school. This was The Honeydrippers’ rendition of it from Volume One. There never was a Volume Two. Just as there never was a “date two”. I cried while Robert Plant sang “I’m so lost and lonely…”
To this very day I feel the sadness of that moment every time I flip to side two. It’s been more than forty years, and I still get a lump in my throat.
Throughout my youth there were certain songs that brought me to tears. Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” is a prime example. I was six when it came out. It made me sad and I didn’t understand why. The same thing with “The Most Beautiful Girl” by Charlie Rich. Same age, same effect.
I could watch both movies today and, while I might still feel a twinge of sadness, it’s nothing like the swell of emotion that hits me when I hear “Young Boy Blues”.
A few months after that one and only date, Bonnie was gone. She’d taken another job somewhere else, and I never saw her again. That Christmas Eve I lay on the carpet with my head under the tree, looking up at the lights. I loved to do that. Still do. MTV was on in the background. Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” came on.
I’m sure you know what happened.
This Week’s Recommendation
I looked at my Amazon purchasing history and saw that I’ve bought this record brush from AudioQuest three times over the last six years. This is the “gold” version. That’s one every two years I invest in. It’s not it goes bad after two years, it’s because I play a lot of records, so that’s a lot of dust and detritus it picks up. I use the protective handle to “sweep” off the lint (by moving it back and forth over the carbon fiber bristles), but over the course of a year or two, things get pushed in and remain. The fact that this is the only record brush I use for a dry sweep before playing, and that I keep buying it, says volumes about my opinion about it’s effectiveness.
Rick’s E-Book Guides
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