Today’s song is from a band I hardly know at all, and it’s
here in honor of the fact that my goddaughter, Anna, is graduating today with a
Masters degree in Occupational Therapy. Anna gave me the song on a disc back
when she was still in high school and I’ve always associated it with a road
trip we took together to look at colleges up in Massachusetts, back in 2007.
It’s an all-acoustic song—a 2000 release from their hugely
popular LP Californication (1999)—from Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is not
something very common. That might be one reason she gave it to me, knowing my
penchant for moody acoustic tunes, rather than something from Stadium Arcadium
(2006), which was the big album of her high school years.
It’s a good “kick-off to summer” song, as it commemorates
not only the imperative to “go get lost anywhere in the U.S.A.” but also
getting into the surf—at Big Sur—which is fitting as Anna’s off to a beach in
the Carolinas for graduation weekend.
It’s also fitting as I’ll be road-trippin’ later this summer myself, in
Minnesota and South Dakota, after some east coast tripping from Connecticut
down to Maryland.
The song has a muted salute to life quality, a little
wistful and little wishful. As if the reunion it’s celebrating—and it’s the
time of year for those too—might not be flat-out fun and frolic. You know how
it is: time passes and the people you knew in college, or at college age, age
into later versions, newer models that still have some of the same memories as
you floating in their craniums somewhere but not necessarily as easily
accessed. But it’s nice to touch base again with one’s “favorite allies” and
recall “So much has come before / Those battles lost and won.” Another way of
saying, “what a long, strange trip it’s been.” Where were you when? And what
are you now? It’s something to see the solidarities of youth get stretched by
the years that follow. It’s something to see the coalitions that form and
dissolve as life goes on . . . and on.
It’s also a song about hitting the beach, which I’ll be
doing in a week and in less than a week I’ll be heeding the call to “leave this
town / It’s time to steal away.” Maryland, where Anna is graduating today, is
the shore I’ll be heading to. Ah, yes, the beachly beach. “Blue, sitting pretty
. . . just a mirror for the sun.” Where I won’t, indeed, stay high and dry.
More than the call of waves, just now, I’m feeling the call to get away, if not
“lost” than at least “gone.” That singular stretch of shore on a little finger
of a peninsula on the Atlantic has been, since before I can remember, the place
to take stock, in the increments of vacation days, of whatever I’ve been
pondering. When I’m down there it will
be interesting to post from the coast and see what effect that has.
Anyway, today’s song is in honor of Master Anna, “your smiling eyes just a mirror for . . .”
Let’s go get lost, let’s go get lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment