I have selected cheesy 80s pop tunes to accompany three auspicious plot developments in my life. What's better than the obviously-not-really-stringed-instrument synths, the ensemble super-songs, the soundtracks, the tender vulnerability, and the bordering-on-naive lyrics of the 80s to represent the awe a person can feel when they reflect on the twisty root systems that have somehow led to the blossoming now?
As a gawky teen, I'd flip through my textured, brown photo album, peer at the faces of my classmates, and fiddle with the sticky cellophane just to hear the noise it made as I peeled it back. While scrutinizing how each of us were placed on those fuzzy choral risers, I counted the years I'd known each kid. Much to my chagrin, I was usually the tallest. These days I think the wide-banged kid-mullet I sported at the end of grade school is more disturbing.
The first page of that photo album was the class picture of Our Redeemer Lutheran preschool class of '85. This class 8x10 was different because each person had their own photo. It was the year my mom foolishly gave me an eye-stinging home-perm that is responsible for my continuing aversion to the notion of curls; while scanning the page, I'd often confuse my picture with another curly-haired girl in my class. That is the same picture I saw of my sister-in-law when I first visited her home. When I met Ana again-- for what I thought was the first time-- I recall looking out from behind the one-hour-film counter from my position at cash register one, and the immediate warmth expressed in her gesture of hello signaled to me that this was a person I was going to love.
This one's for you, hermana ;)
Much art has been created to explore the small choices that alter people's lives; I think of the sunny June, end-of-8th-grade-band-trip that hooked this F Hornist and that trumpeter together like Construx as we went from middle to high school. Walking that mile back to school side-by-side with my fiery, ambitious Angie changed my life.
Love you, friend!
Ryan and I have been together a long time, married almost nine years, long enough that people don't frequently ask us how we met. Most times I just say that we both worked in Fred Meyer Photo Electronics, but here is the truth: a young Colleen, while being cash-register trained, saw Ryan saunter by in hounds-tooth pants and spent a moment in cosmic drool mode, thinking a thought very unlike any she'd had before, that she would make this man hers.
And then the moment passed. I spent a year alternately pining and second guessing before my quarry succumbed to love for me.
Ryancito, this one's for you!
And, as the 80s labor to regain their street cred, I hope the sentiments that defined so many songs and films of the era-- the pressing into the moment, the overly-romantic longing, the searching for eternity in the gaze of another, and the ache for human connection-- return in full force, because 80s pop is the type of refined sugar that really does a body good.
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