A little more than six months ago, I told a friend that I felt a need to get back in touch with the person I was prior to becoming a corporate pawn with mortgage or, you know, a grown up. Call it a mid-life crisis if you'd like but I don't think that is true: I wasn't interested in buying a flash car, radical lifting and tucking, or trading in Dan for fresh eye candy. I just wanted to get reacquainted with the person who packed everything up and moved to a new city without having a home, a job, or a clue. I was thinking more of the me who moved to from Baltimore to Atlanta at 23 but Van Vechten's rule* - you get what you want in the form you deserve - guaranteed that the outcome would prove to be different. Within two months, the power of the internet threw me back twenty-five years, to my first escape into new territory, to a mythical place where my only concerns were having the latest records, a distinguishable look, and the time of my life.
Once again, I found myself surrounded by the same people who began their same journeys along side me - through a door opened by the same person who had opened it way back then, oddly enough - and was thrilled to find that they, too, seemed to be looking for a glimpse of themselves as they once were. Talk of reunions began and then plans for reunions began and, although I generally don't find big plans panning out as intended, I began to get on board and as excited as the next person who was about to begin the experience of the bygone.
No show goes off without a few hitches and this would prove to be no exception. Major players backed out, saddled with responsibilities, goals and deadlines, bad timing, illness, and some piss poor excuses. As the proceedings began, there were some glaring holes in the room which everyone noticed, and then there were smaller, more personal tears that left the events feeling a little less than whole for those who had wished for a perfect recreation of a decade when we were patching together the persons we'd become.
Events were staggered, not by design but by reality, so I was afforded the luxury of a slow re-entry that perfectly complimented my disdain for walking into crowded rooms and, again, I was surprised to find conversations beginning as though we'd only talked the day before - helped along with the months of constant chatter on Facebook, obviously. Old intimacies were instantly re-established as inside-jokes and catch phrases found themselves aired out and myths and legends were re-told for those who may have missed them the first time around, often giving the protagonists a chance to hear their stories from a refreshingly different perspective. From sushi houses to hometown homes, people once again began becoming one, weaving ourselves back together, back to a time where a day rarely went by without us passing on the street, meeting for meals, stumbling over each other on a dance floor, or waking up in the same bed.
I'd forgotten the strength one can feel in numbers, the power of a posse storming the gates, and just how tightly the ties that bind are bound. As names were mentioned and then followed by "I didn't know you knew them!" - always with an exclamation point - and connections were explained, the warp for one was established as the weft of another and the idea of peripheral people was edged out and the circle became smaller. And, although it all may sound so community serviced, I also found comfort in discovering, on the "big night" where it felt as though the entire city was crammed into two clubs, that those same people whom I disliked before were still not to my liking.
One of the benefits of getting older should be finding comfort in your beginnings, be it the family to which you were born, schoolyard friends, your house of worship, or the kinship built when you threw conventionality aside in order to build a more suitable, better you. We may be young only once but, like a good marriage, it's in the eyes of those with whom we were young, that we remain young. As families grow, responsibilities swell, and our bodies drop, it's the bonds we created that can hold us together.
In the time leading up to my trip, a day didn't go buy that I didn't hear Dusty Springfield's version of Goffin-King's "Goin' Back". A few days into the trip, I lucked upon a cut-out copy of "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" and was reacquainted with their take on the song. On her recording, Dusty sounds as though the road behind her is long while The Byrds sound as though theirs is just beginning. I find myself feeling quite comfortable in between. And if I got what I wanted in the form I deserved, I must have done quite a few things right along the way because I'm in fine form.
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