Eternity and the 11th Grade
When I was in 11th grade I fell in love with a girl. We rode the bus home together. That is, we rode the same bus. I would usually try to manipulate things so that I could sit near her or so I could at least see her, but I couldn’t manage to sit next to her – except once. Which isn’t surprising; my whole relationship with her was characterized by me never saying or doing anything to let on that I liked her while wishing like mad that she would come running across the parking lot to me (or something like that) to make life as huge and wonderful as a dream. That never happened, but one day something small and wonderful did happen, because on that day she came and sat next to me.
I remember two things about it, mainly. One was that it was raining outside and when we came to her stop she asked if she could borrow my raincoat. It was an MEC Gortex raincoat, and she used to talk to me about how much she liked MEC. Of course I handed it over and felt something like butterflies as I watched her step off the bus wearing my coat. Looking back, I know that was my chance. She was giving me every sign in the world, and I was still torturing myself over how to find out for sure if she liked me instead of just taking the plunge, telling her how enchanted I was. She kept the coat for two days, and I guess I was supposed to ask for it back as an excuse to talk to her again, but I never clued in. Anyway, she wore a particular kind of perfume that I always thought smelled good, and when she finally gave the coat back it smelled like that. Torture and bliss: it smelled like her.
The other thing I remember is the song that was playing on the bus that day. Our bus driver was a famous grouch with a heart of gold. He always played the radio on his bus, and even though he liked country, he could be convinced every time – usually by one of the prettier girls – to switch it to LG73, the station of teen-aged choice in those days. On this particular day, Right Here Waiting For You by Kenny Marks came on. “Oh, good song!” she said, so I paid attention. I memorized it, actually. I sang it to myself. I wallowed in the tragedy of it:
Wherever you go / whatever you do / I will be right here waiting for you.
Whatever it takes / oh how my heart breaks / I will be right here waiting for you.
And so it became the theme song of my crush, of my teen-aged life, of my own imagined world. I was a tragic hero, always waiting, right there waiting for her, even after she stopped waiting for me to pull myself together and ask her out. She finally started seeing some guy on the basketball team and after grade 11 she moved to a different school. I have no idea where she is now. I hear she’s married.
My raincoat smelled like her for a long time after that day on the bus. I still love that smell. Sometimes it wafts to me out of the blue, on the street, in an elevator, when a woman leaves the train, and a wistful longing comes back to me. The Kenny Marks song, I’m afraid to say, has a similar effect. In a way these are the scent and soundtrack of my life. They remind me of being just out of reach of something wonderful. I feel like that a lot.
These are stupid things to admit. I’m in Afghanistan. I should be writing about the history in the making all around me, the rebuilding of a country, the greed, the nobility, the hopeful and the hopeless, those who sit in the ash heaps and those who pick up stones and sand and make bricks in case someone should need a home. There are plenty of issues; there is so much news. The Taliban are back on the rise, there is a new constitution, a man blew himself up in the capital after Christmas, elections are coming soon. But I am here, wistful and nostalgic. I am here, self-absorbed. I am here, and my colleague’s computer on random play list next to me just started playing Right Here Waiting For You. After years of education and growing up, after making adventurous choices and coming here, far, far away from home, I’m still not very far from the 11th grade.
I do have a point to all this. I’ve always had an acute awareness of my own ache of longing for … something. A song, a smell, a sunrise on the right day can awaken it with such force it stops me in my tracks. It makes me feel like crying, like I’m so far away from home, but it is also so beautiful I want to freeze everything and savour it forever. I don’t think it’s nostalgia over teenaged love or sappy love songs, really. I hope not, because it’s already pretty embarrassing to admit what I already have about Kenny Marks. No, I think it’s more like what the writer of Ecclesiastes meant when he said:
I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men …
I want something big and beautiful to happen, and I want it to last forever. In 11th grade I wanted a girl to turn and run to me suddenly, and I would be right there waiting for her. I spent my teenaged years imagining whole worlds of beautiful things that never happened, except in little fleeting moments like that day on the bus.
But isn’t that what we do? Don’t we arrive on some barren landscape, some ruin in our lives and after sitting for awhile in a heap, at a loss, don’t we start to wish, hope, long that instead of this, it could be beautiful? That is what we are doing in Afghanistan when we are at our best – imagining this place remade, and inching our way towards our vision, impossible as it is so many days. Maybe none of us are so far from 11th grade, maybe we shouldn’t even try to be. Maybe everything that awakens our longing, every time we hear some line in a song, some musical phrase, some chorus that lifts our soul and we don’t know why; every sudden whiff of perfume, the scent of pine trees, the smell of rain before a storm; every time the moon rises over the mountain, every splash of colour in a ruined landscape, every kite that still flies; every time someone turns to us and runs - or when she just sits next to you on the bus – maybe these are the things that are beautiful in their time and leave us with a dream of eternity that we can’t shake from our hearts.
It could be that I’m making too much out of a Kenny Marks song. It’s not a song one should make much of anything out of. Eternity is a tall order for one song, especially that one. (I certainly hope that the soundtrack to my eternity is not Right Here Waiting For You). But I do hope is that whatever that feeling is - whatever longing perfume and pop ballads awake in me - I hope it means that there is something big and beautiful, something huge and wonderful, and that one day it will happen.
I remember two things about it, mainly. One was that it was raining outside and when we came to her stop she asked if she could borrow my raincoat. It was an MEC Gortex raincoat, and she used to talk to me about how much she liked MEC. Of course I handed it over and felt something like butterflies as I watched her step off the bus wearing my coat. Looking back, I know that was my chance. She was giving me every sign in the world, and I was still torturing myself over how to find out for sure if she liked me instead of just taking the plunge, telling her how enchanted I was. She kept the coat for two days, and I guess I was supposed to ask for it back as an excuse to talk to her again, but I never clued in. Anyway, she wore a particular kind of perfume that I always thought smelled good, and when she finally gave the coat back it smelled like that. Torture and bliss: it smelled like her.
The other thing I remember is the song that was playing on the bus that day. Our bus driver was a famous grouch with a heart of gold. He always played the radio on his bus, and even though he liked country, he could be convinced every time – usually by one of the prettier girls – to switch it to LG73, the station of teen-aged choice in those days. On this particular day, Right Here Waiting For You by Kenny Marks came on. “Oh, good song!” she said, so I paid attention. I memorized it, actually. I sang it to myself. I wallowed in the tragedy of it:
Wherever you go / whatever you do / I will be right here waiting for you.
Whatever it takes / oh how my heart breaks / I will be right here waiting for you.
And so it became the theme song of my crush, of my teen-aged life, of my own imagined world. I was a tragic hero, always waiting, right there waiting for her, even after she stopped waiting for me to pull myself together and ask her out. She finally started seeing some guy on the basketball team and after grade 11 she moved to a different school. I have no idea where she is now. I hear she’s married.
My raincoat smelled like her for a long time after that day on the bus. I still love that smell. Sometimes it wafts to me out of the blue, on the street, in an elevator, when a woman leaves the train, and a wistful longing comes back to me. The Kenny Marks song, I’m afraid to say, has a similar effect. In a way these are the scent and soundtrack of my life. They remind me of being just out of reach of something wonderful. I feel like that a lot.
These are stupid things to admit. I’m in Afghanistan. I should be writing about the history in the making all around me, the rebuilding of a country, the greed, the nobility, the hopeful and the hopeless, those who sit in the ash heaps and those who pick up stones and sand and make bricks in case someone should need a home. There are plenty of issues; there is so much news. The Taliban are back on the rise, there is a new constitution, a man blew himself up in the capital after Christmas, elections are coming soon. But I am here, wistful and nostalgic. I am here, self-absorbed. I am here, and my colleague’s computer on random play list next to me just started playing Right Here Waiting For You. After years of education and growing up, after making adventurous choices and coming here, far, far away from home, I’m still not very far from the 11th grade.
I do have a point to all this. I’ve always had an acute awareness of my own ache of longing for … something. A song, a smell, a sunrise on the right day can awaken it with such force it stops me in my tracks. It makes me feel like crying, like I’m so far away from home, but it is also so beautiful I want to freeze everything and savour it forever. I don’t think it’s nostalgia over teenaged love or sappy love songs, really. I hope not, because it’s already pretty embarrassing to admit what I already have about Kenny Marks. No, I think it’s more like what the writer of Ecclesiastes meant when he said:
I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men …
I want something big and beautiful to happen, and I want it to last forever. In 11th grade I wanted a girl to turn and run to me suddenly, and I would be right there waiting for her. I spent my teenaged years imagining whole worlds of beautiful things that never happened, except in little fleeting moments like that day on the bus.
But isn’t that what we do? Don’t we arrive on some barren landscape, some ruin in our lives and after sitting for awhile in a heap, at a loss, don’t we start to wish, hope, long that instead of this, it could be beautiful? That is what we are doing in Afghanistan when we are at our best – imagining this place remade, and inching our way towards our vision, impossible as it is so many days. Maybe none of us are so far from 11th grade, maybe we shouldn’t even try to be. Maybe everything that awakens our longing, every time we hear some line in a song, some musical phrase, some chorus that lifts our soul and we don’t know why; every sudden whiff of perfume, the scent of pine trees, the smell of rain before a storm; every time the moon rises over the mountain, every splash of colour in a ruined landscape, every kite that still flies; every time someone turns to us and runs - or when she just sits next to you on the bus – maybe these are the things that are beautiful in their time and leave us with a dream of eternity that we can’t shake from our hearts.
It could be that I’m making too much out of a Kenny Marks song. It’s not a song one should make much of anything out of. Eternity is a tall order for one song, especially that one. (I certainly hope that the soundtrack to my eternity is not Right Here Waiting For You). But I do hope is that whatever that feeling is - whatever longing perfume and pop ballads awake in me - I hope it means that there is something big and beautiful, something huge and wonderful, and that one day it will happen.
posted by rjs | 9:46 PM
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