![]() It’s the story of a young trophy girlfriend (or maybe wife) who “is headed for the cheatin’ side of town.” Love, failure, heartache, longing, drinking: it was all there. I liked the whole album, but Side 1, track three spread before me like I was in an airplane flying over the landscape of adulthood at sunrise. Then, in the winter of 1977, we got the first Eagles greatest-hits album. My parents had the Bay City Rollers’s “Greatest Hits,” ABBA’s “Arrival,” “Elton John’s Greatest Hits,” and some K-Tel disco collections. Occasionally, the sun came out, bobbing along behind the clouds and above the tree line, the color of a yellow Tums.įor the first few years, I found my only entertainment in the names of places: “What if someone’s name was Al Bany?” or “Burlington, Bennington, Castleton, Springfield, Pittsfield, Greenfield-why is everything a ‘ton’ in Vermont and a ‘field’ in Massachusetts?” I remember the day I realized Boston was a grand exception, and how this almost felt like human interaction, like Boston and I had figured this out together. As my weight was “a concern,” my parents discouraged me from eating between meals, so I was bored and also hungry. I could catch the odd word from their conversations, but never enough to participate. My brother always sat up front with my parents, and I rode alone in the back, because my brother got carsick and I didn’t. I sprinkled Jean Naté or Florida Water on the insides of my turtlenecks and pulled them up all the way to my eyes. On the way home, it smelled of dirty hockey equipment. On the way to wherever we were going, the car smelled of the oxidizing cores of McIntosh apples. We drove on dull highways we crossed foamy brown rivers on green metal bridges. In her place were angry people in parkas. One day, I got excited because we were going to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where the Witch of Blackbird Pond lived. Sometimes we ate lunch in the car from a cooler. Then we got into our Chevy Suburban, with its udders of dirty ice. My father woke us up at dawn, and we ate in shifts, standing over the grate heaters in our drafty kitchen. Getting to his games involved long drives every weekend from our house in western Massachusetts to towns all over New England. When I was a kid, in the late nineteen-seventies, my older brother played in a Pee Wee hockey league. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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