Yesterday was a day of union. One of my groups of college friends gathered in Eureka, Illinois for my friend Cathy’s wedding. On the way there, I got a text from my friend Stephanie that another group of our college friends would be in Indianapolis for a wedding.
Cathy’s wedding was evenly split between people from the Shaumburg area (northern Chicago suburbs) and the “downstate crowd,” which is what the Shaumburg natives call anyone south of I-80 (even though part of Orland Park is south of I-80, but that’s another discussion).
At one point during the reception, I grabbed the mic and told the Schaumburg crowd that we would be dancing to “America’s real national anthem.” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” blasted through the speakers.
A few minutes later, “Here’s to the Night” played. I grabbed a pretty girl, and slowly encircled the dance floor.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t just in that room when those songs played. Lynyrd Skynyrd took me back to the farm, a hundred memories crowded my mind. Sweet Home Alabama played in a wedding reception or airport or through my white earbuds as I stare up at the stars in my own backyard, will always take me back home. Four wheelers. Cousins. A place called on the McGee Creek called Wilson’s Fjord.
And “Here’s to the Night.” Senior year. Late May. Just driving with my friend Michael, realizing that everything was about to change. The cool night wind whipping through our open windows, night as darks as the unknown we were walking into. And we didn’t know what was ahead. Sure, we knew that we were going off to school and our friends were all headed in different directions, and we knew graduation was eight days away. But those were just the stats, the bullet points. The real ones were “will I find my place in the world?” “Who am I, really?” “What if I fail?” “Will I Find someone to love?”
We didn’t have any answers, but we had some songs. So we cranked up the speakers and let the our favorite bands say the things we couldn’t get past our lips. “Here’s to the night we felt alive/here’s to tears you knew you’d cry/Here’s to goodbye/tomorrow’s gonna come too soon.”
Eight years later, I’m a different version of myself than 18-year-old-Seth who was looking for the answers. I’ve found a number of them. I’ve traded in my chuck taylors and punk rock t-shirts for a j crew polo and pair of patent leather slip ons. I’ve got a career, world travel experience, six triathlons under my belt. I’m wiser, more experienced, with a few more scars and tattoos (and, dare I say it, wrinkles) than that high school graduate. But I’ve become a little more jaded too, burned a few too many times.
The point is this. Whenever Eve 6 comes on, the song takes me to a pivotal point where I once stood, but will always need. I feel 18-year-old-Seth inside of me. Today, I need him. I need his sense of wonder, his fresh eyes on the world. Every single “Sweet Home Alabama” graces a pair of speakers, I connect with 14-year-old-Seth, the quiet dreamer, the skinny basketball player, with a hungry heart to break away and see what’s out there. And I still need his energy, his boundless enthusiasm for what may lay over behind the next sunrise.
I stayed at my grandmother’s house in Peoria last night (she’s in South Carolina at the moment, so I was there alone). As I was eating breakfast, I flipped on the TV, since the house was so quiet. The final few minutes of the 90’s teen comedy “Can’t Hardly Wait” was playing. Sitting at the breakfast table, I mouthed every single line. “That’s when I realized, there is such a thing as fate. But it only takes you so far, and then it’s up to you to make it happen,” the movie character and I say together.
I turned off the movie and wept. And I don’t mean I wiped away a single tear. Wept. I wept because I watched that movie with my high school friends piled onto couches. I wept because those same people are now spread throughout the country, and we’ll probably never be in the same room again. I wept because they loved me, and we needed each other, because I would have never become me if it wasn’t for them.
This is why I love media. Because media, if it’s truly inspired, will always help us see truth. What’s labeled as mere nostalgia is often a window into something far deeper. Helps us see where we’ve been, or maybe a glimpse of where we’re going. Helps us feel how fragile life really is. Or, as the the wedding program read “This is how you truly love something. As if you could lose it at any moment.”
Songs, and books, and films, and the occasional episode of Scrubs, help me see the different stages of my life. Three minute pop songs remind me of the blessings poured over me, and how quickly the times fade away.
So this is my prayer for you today. As you go through school and try new things, as you weep over the first broken heart that we must all endure, as a date becomes a relationship and then a left handed ring, as you lose your heart to a with a child, don’t forget to take some songs with you. And then share them with your date, fiancee, spouse, blast them late at night with your friends, put them on and explain to your children who and where you were when these songs first played.
I hope have some leaving, and some coming home again. But whichever way the road is pointing right now, crank up the speakers and build a soundscape for your experiences. Because life is crowded, and the human mind will lose some of the details that make us alive. But I’ve often found those precious details, those treasured pieces again, wrapped up in chords and melody.
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