A Sunday Moment

Today, driving home from work, it felt like fall. The air was kind of cool and sharp, and something about the quality of the light tricked me into thinking it was getting dark early instead of still being light enough to play outside at eight. Part of that might be the music I was listening to, as well.

I’ve been taking aural time machine trips back to my freshman year of college and listening to The Sundays. Strangely, the most vivid memory I have of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic is not of autumn, but of cleaning my parent’s house in the summer, stereo turned up loud, doors open, dust rag in hand.

(My mother left me lists of chores to do while she was at work whenever I lived at home, up until the last time I lived at home which was when I was about 25. Nothing makes you feel better about having to move in with your parents again than shuffling out of bed around noon to find a neatly printed note on the counter asking you to please clean the living room (sub-bulleted with items like dust, vacuum (move furniture!), Windex the TV screen) and don’t forget to put the clean dishes in the dish washer away.)

But so, despite the reality of the actually memory, the songs were making me feel decidedly autumnal, which was in turn making me feel nostalgic. Whatever the actual circumstances in my life at the time, I know that the lyrics on this album meant a lot to me.

Like these:

I won the war in the sitting room
I won the war but it cost me
I won the war and I feel proud
but God only knows why it’s hard to get to sleep in my house

I mean if that’s not the absolute anthem of a bored, sullen 18-year-old girl trying to find enough discontent in her home life to justify some insane course of action like joining a cult or getting married so she could move out, then I don’t know what is.

And these:

but I’ll keep hoping you are the only one
yes, and I’ll send you letters, oh, wouldn’t it be such fun
oh, we are who we are, whatever the others say
but poetry is not for me, as much as I’d like to stay
oh, I just want to go home

In other words, high school boyfriend, I’m in college now, and you were fun to make out with in cars in high school but really all you’re doing now is boring me because I am world weary, burdened with knowledge, and smarter than you.

The last song on the album was always my favorite. The lyrics are kind of hard to understand, but the music is sweeping and epic and dark and hopeful at the same time, just like I like ‘em. I circumvented the oblique lyrics by making up my own, and just assuming that whatever Harriet Wheeler wrote was better and much more meaningful.

I’m a little older now and I don’t have as many delusions of alluring moodiness, so I’m able to listen to song lyrics with more objectivity. And as I listened to this song, I realized she was singing about the Lone Ranger. And his clothes. So when I came home today, I looked up the lyrics and sure enough:

the Lone Ranger sold his wardrobe
the Lone Ranger sold his bad dog
well you saw him and you could hardly know
cos times change…. I know

Nostalgia is fun, and I still love her voice, but sometimes it’s a real drag to lose those old illusions. But that’s almost made up for by the fact that the fake lyrics I wrote were actually better and more meaningful than Harriet Wheeler’s.

Or maybe it’s just easier to replace those old illusions with new ones than it is to lose them altogether.