She wasn’t around very long, but that’s OK
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- December 12, 2020
- 654
I should remember her better.
After all, she was the first girl I ever kissed.
But it all came about so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that even in the heat of the moment, I could feel the transitory nature of our intimate transaction, the very evanescence of something fading.
She was — and this is gospel — the daughter of a preacher man.
To those of you whose memories remain reliably intact, this detail doubtless triggers the mental jukebox you carry around in your mind. All of a sudden, the needle drops on the record and it’s December 1968 once more.
“Billy Ray was the preacher’s son,” it starts, Dusty Springfield’s soulful voice luring you in, setting the stage for some sublime storytelling, “and when his daddy would visit, he’d come along.”
Two and a half minutes later, you’re convinced not only that it’s one of the greatest singles you’ve ever heard, but also that her vocal performance is simply brilliant.
But it’s the drama in the narrative, the forbidden fruit dangling from the tree of adolescence, that roots you to your spot, awed.
When Dusty drops in the line, “Being good isn’t always easy, no matter how hard I try,” you could imagine parents everywhere reaching out to change the station on the car radio.
But that’s precisely what rock ‘n’ roll was all about.
My mom and dad, though, never tried to shelter me from the music I loved; on the contrary, they gave me a guitar for Christmas 1964, realizing the Beatles were an unstoppable, powerful force.
There was music in every room in our house. You could walk from Dad’s den, tuned to those Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, all the way down to the basement, where my stereo might be blasting the Ramones, and you’d hear it everywhere.
Mom played the piano, a love she passed to my brother, and my sister practiced her flute every afternoon, perfecting a discipline she’s never abandoned.
My guitar playing days ended rather quickly when it came down to a choice between music lessons and Little League, and I suppose that’s one of those fork-in-the-road moments everyone has, though had I been learning “Satisfaction” instead of “Red River Valley,” who knows what might have been.
“You’ve got good technique,” my instructor said toward the end of one of our last Saturday afternoon sessions, “and your fingers will only get longer and stronger.”
But I wasn’t into it, not the way I should have been, and I think he knew it too. I was 10 years old and ready to move on.
Flash forward five years.
I’m a sophomore in high school, growing my hair longer, dealing with geometry and chemistry classes, still going to church every Sunday and finding the social scene just as alien as ever. But that doesn’t bother me because on some basic level my reptilian brain understands you can’t miss what you’ve never had.
So the last — and I mean the very last — thing on my mind when I walked into the kitchen from baseball practice that spring afternoon was meeting a girl from Goshen who would very soon take her place in my fledgling Hall of Firsts.
Cue the Zombies, please.
I wish I could tell you a lot more about the way she looked, the way she acted, the color of her hair, but about all I can remember is that she was in town for some kind of religious exchange program.
Somehow my sister was involved, and it was always my policy to steer clear of her social whirl, since it was so dizzying, she being involved in so many activities with so many friends that I quickly lost track of who might be visiting the house.
All I wanted was something cold to drink before heading up to the bedroom I shared with my younger brother.
But then I was introduced to the daughter of a preacher man.
“Indiana, eh?” I said, my dazzling conversational repartee letting me down yet again. “When do you go back?”
It wasn’t meant as anything other than a simple interrogative, but once the words had left my mouth, I wished I could pull them back.
But instead of being insulted, she laughed.
“Your brother’s kind of funny,” she said to my sister, “isn’t he?”
So I left with a bottle of Choc-Ola and went upstairs. A few minutes later, the daughter of a preacher man knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” I said, putting down my first-edition copy of Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four,” which I had just bought with my lawn-mowing money.
“You mind if I come in?” she asked, walking in and sitting on the edge of my brother’s bed, about 15 feet away. “It’s OK, right?”
I think she was wearing a red-and-white checked shirt, something like you’d see at a picnic, something that reminded me of a tablecloth, and blue jeans, not the flared bellbottoms that were in vogue, but something along the lines of dungarees, work pants.
“Yep,” she said, seeing me staring at her clothes, “I live on a farm — Indiana girl from the middle of nowhere.”
“Well,” I said, “this isn’t exactly New York City.”
And then I put on a record: the first side of the Woodstock album. I remember that well. And then I sat down next to her on my brother’s bed. And what happened next was that, right in the middle of John Sebastian’s “I Had a Dream,” she kissed me.
It was just that simple and just that lovely and just that gentle. What had seemed so elusive, so mysterious, so impossible turned out to be like strumming a chord on a guitar, everything in tune.
The Woodstock album, as you know, extends over six sides of three long-playing records, and we, um, listened to them all.
By the time the last notes of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” were fading away, we gathered ourselves and went back downstairs, where the kitchen was empty and we said goodbye.
I never saw the daughter of a preacher man again, but then again, I’d never expected to meet anyone like her in the first place. She floated into my life and out again just as quickly as a phantasm.
There are moments like that in everyone’s life, and they remind us of all that is possible, all that is left to discover, all that life offers.
Of course, it helps if you’ve got the proper music in mind.