Tag: growing up

Music, Parenting

Last Night, I Couldn’t Sleep

smirkpretty

We are a little late getting to bed. Bug has just returned from a long New Year’s winter family camp weekend at the Frost Valley YMCA in the Catskills. His dad reported that Bug actually sang a Justin Bieber song at Karaoke in the dining hall in front of everyone. This, in addition to rocket-making and going down the tubing hill 13 or so times.
 
When my kid returns from these camp weekends, he has adopted funny new mannerisms. Tonight, he makes a little tchk with his cheek and cocks his head while he chatters at me. While he builds legos, he sings, “We are never, ever, ever, getting back together” under his breath. Also, his face is smeared with blue, his hands are purple, and he smells. Hygiene is not a top priority at camp.
 
After bath and jammies, we settle into his bed together. I finish the last book and set it on the floor. Bug is deep into his drawing of some complex set of ladders and pulleys again. I rub his back and start to sing. I don’t get one line into “Baby Beluga” before Bug stops me.
 
“Don’t sing, please.”
 
I stop rubbing. This is new. “Do you want a different one?”
 
“No.” He is coloring hard with dark blue marker. The work of our bath is quickly being reversed. “No songs. Just cuddles.”
 
I stoke his back again with a little more care. He colors in silence.
 
Is that it? Did it just happen? Did my little boy cross over? Someone once said that you will never know when read your child Goodnight Moon for the last time. We step blindly over milestones as if they are just cracks in the sidewalk.
 
I think back to our Christmas week together in Texas. On the first evening there, we sang from our caroling songbook. The second night, Bug asked me not to sing. I thought this was some combination of the laryngitis making me sound like a geriatric goose and the general overstimulation of our lodgings. The final three nights of our visit, he asked me not to sing. This was fine with me because even speaking had become a burden.
 
Are we finished with bedtime songs? Was it over the night before Christmas? Surely, it can’t happen like this. Boom, a kid enters a new stage and there is no looking back? Doesn’t he understand how momentous and heartbreaking this is?
 
“No songs at all?” I venture. “Not even ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’?”
 
“No, thanks,” he says.
 
I watch him add an extra ladder. Adapt or die, as they say.
 
“What are you drawing?”
 
“Guess,” he says.
 
If I can’t sing, I can at least have a conversation with him. In the split second it takes him to enter adolescence, he may well become more irritated by my existence than indulgent of it. I suppose I better get with the program. I look at his drawing more closely. He inks a line from the ladder to a platform where a smiling person stands.
 
“A zipline?”
 
“Yep,” he says. “It’s a high ropes course.”
 
We talk about this for a few moments. He points out what is what. Our exchange is pretty spotty because he is still focused on his composition. The side of his hand and the wristband of his new digger-truck jammies are smeared gray-blue.
 
“Alright, Bud. I’m going to get everything ready for school tomorrow. Finish up the picture and lights out in just a minute, okay?”
 
“Mmm-hmm.” He starts on the higher element at the top of the page. The Flying Squirrel? The Postman’s Walk? He doesn’t give. I kiss his head and go downstairs to finish the dishes. I have almost finished loading the dishwasher when I hear the plaintive cry from the landing. “Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
 
“Yes, baby?”
 
“You forgot to put the cool water by my bed.”
 
I grin and come upstairs. “We are out of practice after a few days away, huh? I filled it up when you were brushing your teeth but we both forgot to take it to your room. Here.” I help him find the cup. He has not stayed in this house for eleven nights. I have to remember that these transitions take some adjustment. He gulps deeply and crawls back into bed, picking up an orange marker on the way. I stroke his head. “You need to finish up so you can get some sleep for tomorrow.”
 
“Okay.”
 
I lumber back downstairs to finish packing snack and putting away laundry.
 
“Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
 
I walk to the landing with a sigh. “Yes, buddy?”
 
“I need to go potty.”
 
“So, go potty.” He smiles big, wrapping his arm around my shoulder as I climb the stairs. “Let me guess. You took a nap in the car on the way home from camp today, didn’t you?”
 
He bounces into the bathroom. “What do you think I’m going to say?”
 
“I think you’re going to say, ‘yes’.”
 
He makes a silly face then nods. We goof with our faces going from stern to giggles. “Do you want to come in and see what I drew after I go potty?”
 
“Sure, baby. Then it’s bedtime.”
 
He digs out a pile of sketches that he has produced in the few minutes I was downstairs. This one shows an elaborate series of ladders and several emergency vehicles including two medi-vac helicopters. “It’s an underground hospital,” he tells me. “That’s blood. All full of blood. And that’s the thing with the wheels they take the people out of the helicopter on.”
 
“A stretcher?”
 
“Yep. And this is an ambulance. And here is the X-Ray machine.”
 
“Baby, it is so far past your bedtime, it’s not even funny.”
 
“Okay.”
 
I go downstairs to make copies of his paperwork to start the new before-school program.
 
“Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
 
I take a deep breath, round the foyer, and mount the stairs. “Bedtime,” I say quietly. “No more coloring.”
 
“But why aren’t you in bed?”
 
“Because I can’t finish my chores with someone calling me upstairs every seventeen seconds. Here. Hop into bed. We’re done.” I take away the clipboard and set it on the floor and put the sack of markers in the drawer. He pulls the blanket up.
 
Gently, gently, I make the offer. “How about a song to help you get to sleep?”
 
He nods and wiggles down under the blanket. “Okay. Will you lay down with me?”
 
“You bet.”
 
“And maybe do all three songs?”
 
“Sure thing, buddy.”
 
He smiles his dozy, droop-eyed smile and presses up against me. As the tune leaves my lips, I hear every word of every verse much more clearly than I have in years.
 
Tonight is probably not the last page of this chapter, but how could I know if it were? We just never know how close we are to the end. There is no way to flip ahead to see. I sing him the whole of each song well past his bedtime and deep into slumber. I add a free fourth tune for good measure just to make up for all the ones I will never hum into his drowsy neck again once he says goodbye to the lullaby for good.
 

Let’s not talk about fare-the-wells now
The night is a starry dome.

As long as this moment lasts, I sing my boy to sleep.
 

—

From Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” off the forever twilight album, Blue.

Family, Happy Days

Happy 100 Days: 10

smirkpretty

In the hours before we leave for the airport, the erratic artillery fire of footsteps rattles the house. Four of us, up and down and in and out. We somehow manage to eat a full breakfast and pull off an early-morning pre-Christmas gift exchange in the midst of it all. Bug purchased surprise tchotchkes for all of us from Colvin Run Mill’s gift weekend for kids. Volunteers take children through the country store with their lists and budget helping them both pick out and wrap the presents. Parents are not allowed. It if fun to see my little boy growing up enough to take pride in selecting treasures for each of us. He bought me a lime green kitty cat ring-keeper. Considering how much he loves to play in my jewelry box, the gift is especially sweet.
 
During our morning exchange, Bug crawled around behind the tree and made a pile for each of us. It is amazing how quickly he has put the alphabet together into words. He reads the names on the tags easily, tossing each gift into a pile. Never mind that the tags are hand-letters and a little smeary and that each of us goes by different names to one another. He understands whose is whose. He counts them out and makes sure we take turns.
 
Then we are done and off to the bath, the laundry, the packing. Giovanni stops by to drop off gifts and to say goodbye. This is not an easy moment. He is moving out of his apartment in a few weeks and we are seeing less of each other. The New Year will be very different than the last. After giving Bug the winning gift of the morning — a Lego minecraft set  — Giovanni kneels down and says, “Listen, buddy. I won’t be seeing a lot of you. If you ever, ever want to talk to me, you just tell your mommy that you want to call me. You can call me anytime, okay?”
 
“Okay,” Bug says, only half looking at him. Giovanni sweeps Bug into a bear hug and tells him he loves him. Watching him attend to my son through this farewell makes me shiver. I can feel those arms as if they are holding my own heart. I take a breath and decide not to cry as he kisses me hard before driving away.
 
Soon, we are at the end of the morning. We take out the garbage, empty the dishwasher, set up the cat’s food bowl for the kitty-sitter. All through it, the bump-bump-bump the overstuffed suitcases and the last remembered items shake the rafters.
 
Another Christmas awaits us when we land at DFW. My grandmother, still kicking at 92 despite the dementia and the broken hip, will have all five of her children and a good fraction of her assorted grandkid under one roof this year. It will be bright chaos. It will be a story to tell.
 
And we never know when it might be goodbye.
 

Growing Up

Happy 100 Days: 15

smirkpretty

Dear One,
 
The mist was thick on the garden this morning. I could barely see the blackbirds except for the occasional crimson flash like a splash of blood on the tall grass. The rabbits have come back this year. They are impossible to miss. Some mama decided to keep her babies here and also to invite all her sisters to move in with their broods. I have seen the small brown one at the foot of the bending oak. I can’t imagine it is very comfortable there on its young feet. The roots are knotting up through the packed soil. The acorn tops are tiny daggers hidden among stone.
 
I hope you make it for a visit. The house has been quiet since the little ones left. They aren’t so little, I suppose, but I can’t think of them any other way. I have yet to put away the stack of games in the living room or to arrange the sheet music in the piano bench. The clutter is a welcome noise. It makes the transition to their absence less abrupt. After a few hours of writing at my desk, it is a nice thing to come down to traces of the children.
 
Today, a new soup is simmering on the stove. Those dried field beans the neighbor brought by finally made it into circulation. It was fun to touch them, to soak them, and to know they grew in a little patch of soil right here. I like to think of her hands pulling the from the vines. We may not have acres, but what we have, we use well.
 
The thyme and rosemary are drying, hung from twine at the ceiling in the kitchen. I gave her some of the herbs last summer and so she brought the beans. Come to think of it, this might be a good winter to come up with a more contained system for the garlic and herbs. Green dust and bits of paper skin perpetually swirl on the kitchen floor. I like the aroma, though. I can’t bear to seal all this in jars just yet even if it would make a clean path. It is so nice just to reach up for a sprig of this or that and to toss it in the pan. I still love (love!) that smell of olive oil when it is heating over the flame and calling for me to begin.
 
I hope to share some of this with you when you come.
 
Know I am here and waiting for you, sweet love. You are always welcome.
 
With my heart,
Your Future Self
 

Growing Up, Parenting

Happy 100 Days: 34

smirkpretty

I climb in and wrap
my arms around the boy I know
is forever mine
and forever
my only.
I use these secret lies
to balm the places
that will be pruned
without  my consent
and without fair
warning.

—

He is still fidgeting, clicking his tongue’s metronome against the verses of the song.
 
“Shh, baby. Take a deep breath.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Because we are helping the little whale get ready for bedtime.” I speak in a whisper. Bug turns, his pajama top riding up over his belly. I tug it back down, stroking my fingers against his back and side as he rolls yet again. He is a porpoise, rifling through the sheets and leaving a storm of tangled linen in his wake. He shivers. “Shhh.” I take in a deep breath and let my chest rise before easing the air out. I watch him do the same. “That baby whale is gliding in the dark water under the starry sky, slowly, slowly, until it’s just the waves bobbing him to sleep.”
 
Bug presses backwards into me and sighs. His lungs flutter like fins before finding the rhythm of the lullaby. He is half awake and then not and then he has slipped down below the surface where I cannot reach. I finish out the final verses. The song is a treasure chest I have to close so nothing precious escapes.
 
With the morning sun
Another day’s begun
you’ll soon be waking. . .
 
I breathe the tune down low, voice vibrating out through my ribs and into his.
 
In the face of these legacies his daddy and I leave him to bear (the poor eyesight, the tempest heart) at least the lyrics I have stashed away in those underground caves will be there if he chooses to seek comfort there. With song, even the deepest places will retain one small portion of light. He will learn, should we not fail him completely, that this will be more than enough to find his way.
 

Co-Parenting, Growing Up, Happy Days

Happy 100 Days: 44

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Rest comes easily now. Finally, after all these years, the dreams are sweet.

This weekend, I met a new someone deep down in the valley sleep. He was a young man with red-blonde hair and a curious, distracted gaze. He clutched a hardcover book. Maybe he is Bug in 20 years, maybe the whisper of a companion I will someday greet. Maybe he is just that friend of mine I am learning to be.

We sat near each other on a deck built over a creek and the water burbled just beneath our feet. He opened the and the corner of it touched my knee but he was too absorbed to remember to turn it towards me. We spoke our breathless dance about a text neither of us quite understood. I let my fingertips fall on the back of his hand where it grazed the page. He did not reach back for me. I was happy regardless. He turned the page. We talked on.

Proximity can sate hunger. So, it seems, can distance.

I woke up smiling even though he was gone.

Continue reading “Happy 100 Days: 44” →

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Happy 100 Days: 54

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Needs: Water, Trees, Shelter
Wants: Ice Cream, Popsicle, Jellybeans

 
The seller accepts my offer over all the others. Even cash from investors, higher bids from FHA borrowers, and promises of covering closing costs do not beat me out. It is a strong offer with 20% down, but the letter my realtor writes is the golden ticket. She paints a picture of Bug and me, growing up together there in that exact corner of the planet.
 
The record kicks up to 78 rpm. The lyrics are a high frequency tumult. The homeowner, gun shy because her last two buyers had their financing fall through at the 11th hour, is in a kerfuffle. She has something else waiting, it seems. This has taken her months longer than the overheated market promised. She wants the sale to be settled by the first week of December and to be moved out by the holidays.
 
Push, push, push. I take a breath and tell my realtor I’m sorry, but everyone will have to wait. I need to sit with this possibility for a day or two and let it work its way through my bloodstream. I also have to finish up my week at the office, pick up my son from school, and get some sleep. The homeowner needs an answer yesterday. I understand she is frantic, but she will have to wait a few more tomorrows. If she wants fast, an investor will fork over $200 grand in cash and then lease the place out to the next sucker who will pay twice the mortgage in rent. I don’t say this, of course. I just remind myself to be kind yet firm.
 
I am in a kerfuffle my own self. Buy now and take on the cost of the commute? Hold out for that phantom place closer to Tee and my work with half the square footage for a mere $40,000 more, all while risking losing out on these bargain-basement interest rates?
 
Between idealism and practicality, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
 
This place is cozy and light. It has big bedrooms, a fireplace, a yard with promise. It is on a bus line with transportation to my metro stop. It is near the Korean Spa that I love. It is walking distance to a supermarket, a library, and a park.
 
The living room is so narrow, I whine to myself. I want a place closer to the metro. Something with woods nearby. A basement. A guest room.
 
I slow down and consider what this new life is teaching me. Hell, my six-year-old has this stuff figured out already. Have I not learned anything in the past two years?
 
Wants: Acres of open land. A toolshed and workshop. A ten-minute walk to the office. A basement dance studio.
Needs: A safe neighborhood. A quiet bedroom. A reliable way to get to work. A place for my son to learn, play, and grow.
 
Back and forth in myself, the longing for what is not (yet) within reach swings and clangs. The wanting makes me curl my lip at this beautiful opportunity to fulfill my family’s needs.
 
Between spoiled and growing up, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
 
We have the inspection scheduled for Thursday. She was pushing for Tuesday, but both the inspector and I carved out a few more days. Once we are finished digging around under the carpets and behind the hot water heater, I will have three days to make a decision. Barring any issues in financing, I could be on my way to home ownership by Thanksgiving.
 
Seven months ago, I was still sure that I was trapped in dire financial straits with no ladder in sight. The era of staying at home with Bug, following Tee’s vague career trajectory from one time zone to the next, and eventually divorcing had reduced my financial and professional foundation to rubble. I clung to an image of myself hefting one broken stone at a time back onto something resembling a wall with no blueprint in hand and all the pieces on the brink of toppling again.
 
That was not what was happening, of course. Six months ago, I began to realize that the story I was telling myself was doing a better job holding me back than my circumstances were:

If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?

And so. The bank agrees to loan me many thousands of dollars, my department pushes through a small raise, the realtor helps me squeeze into the two-day window when my crush of a house is back on the market, and BOOM!
 
The seller accepts my offer.
 
Wants: Ice Cream, popsicles, jellybeans. Gingerbread cottages. White knights. Happily ever after.
Needs: Water, trees, shelter.
 
Home.
 

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Happy 100 Days: 78 (Coup D’Etat)

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Bug: Who’s going to die first, you or me?

Mommy: Probably me, but not for a long time. I plan to live until I’m really, really old.

Bug: How old?

Mommy: Until after you have kids, and your kids have kids, and you’re a grandpa and I’m a great grandma. Then maybe I’ll live a little longer just for kicks.

Bug: My kids will be your grandkids?

Mommy: Yes, if you decide to have kids. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Do you think you’d like to be a daddy someday?

Bug: If I’m not a daddy, will you have grandkids at all?

Mommy: Nope. You’re my only child. You’re my one shot.

Bug: So, I get to decide if you become a grandma?

Mommy: Looks that way. It’s all up to you.

Bug: So that means I have all the power.
 

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Birthday Boy

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This is what I wrote on my long-ago blog just after we brought our little boy home six years ago. Happy birthday, Bug!
 

 
We made it through our first full night in bed. The near disabling fear of crushing or dropping you has finally begun to dissipate. The first few nights after you came home, my mind raced around like a skittish cat, imagining every terrible way I could lose you. I had to be a sentry, and ached to wrap you in a bubble of pure protection. I was so tense with watchfulness, your grandma had to buy me a sports mouth guard to keep me from grinding my teeth to powder during the night.
 
Now, I am starting to trust you are here for the long haul. When you wake to nurse, you rest up against my side, opening your eyes wide into the faint glow of the flashlight I keep in the bed and looking all around. I know you cannot see me yet, but I love to watch your deep violet eyes, try to catch their gaze as they trace the shapes of the bedroom. Our bedroom. Yours.
 

 
When you are finally satisfied and begin to drift off back into that mysterious place that holds you most of the day and night, I roll you back onto my tummy to sleep. Your face is towards me so I can watch you sleep. Your cheek can pick up the familiar rhythm of me. We both can sleep. All I need to be reassured, even deep in my own restfulness, is the occasional mew and wiggle against my belly. I know you are safe here. You belong here.
 

 
Sometime near dawn this morning, you gulped too much air and developed such a hearty case of the hiccups, the bed shook. I remembered you as an inside-baby, when your hics could send little earthquakes through my entire frame. I am still in awe of the you here with me, knowing you are the same you who floated and fluttered inside me all those months. When I run my finger down the string of beads making up your spine, I cannot believe I grew you. Flesh and bone, brain and body. You sprouted from that tiny germinated seed, and grew into you. Our Bug. Our son.
 

 

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Happy 100 Days: 89

smirkpretty

In the car, we talk about the special things a kid can do when he turns six. “You can join little league and play baseball,” I tell him. “Or be in the big kid gymnastics.”
 
“What else?” He asks.
 
“Well, once you turn six, you have to use your own metro card.”
 
He gasps. “I can have my very own metro card? Can we go get it right now?”
 
“We’re on our way to school,” I laugh. “And besides. You’re not six until tomorrow.”
 
“Oh, yeah.”
 
Wheat Bug doesn’t know is that I have already bought him a SmarTrip card and that I am heading to Staples on my lunch break to find a sleeve and a retractable clip just like the one he is always trying to steal out of my purse.
 
“What else can I do when I’m six?”
 
“Well, there are probably new rides you can go on at the amusement park. And I think you can use some of the big-kid high ropes elements at camp.”
 
“When I’m six, can I drink mouthwash?”
 
“Can you what?
 
“I mean,” he says in that exaggerated don’t-be-a-doofus tone kids master far too early, “can I use mouthwash.”
 
“Do you know how to use it?” This whole conversation has taken an unexpected turn. Since so many of ours do, I suppose I should stop being surprised by these detours. On a recent commute, I found us in a very detailed conversation about breast cancer. I had to puzzle out how to explain cell mutation in response to my kid’s increasingly complex questions.
 
We are nearing school now. From the back seat, he says, “Yeah. To use mouthwash, you kind of swish it around and gargle it and then you spit it out.”
 
“That’s a pretty cool thing to do when you’re six, huh?”
 
“Yep,” he says.
 
“Okay. If you want to, you can start using mouthwash.”
 
His grin lights up the rearview mirror. “Yay, yay, yay!”
 
We turn into the Chicken School parking lot, and we are jostling backpacks and kissing goodbye and rushing off to the next thing.
 
Later that night, after we have made the brownies for school, put on jammies, and opened a couple of birthday-eve gifts (including a Nerf football and Lego mining truck that arrived special-delivery at bedtime by Giovanni), we head in to brush teeth. Bug is bouncing out of his skin, hopped up on brownie batter and anticipation. When we are all done, I pick up the blue bottle of mouthwash next to the sink.
 
“You ready to try it?”
 
Bug darkens and backs away. “No.” His expression is grim.
 
“I thought this was a special deal for six-year-olds,” I say.
 
“Yeah, but Mom, my birthday is not until tomorrow.”
 
“Ah.” I set the bottle back down. Bug relaxes. “No reason to rush things, huh?”
 
“Yeah,” he says. He is already out the door.
 
No reason to rush.
 
Right. We’ll keep trying to remember that one.
 

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Wind Me Up

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Kissing is fine. It is pleasant enough. Repeat the act a few dozen-hundred-thousand times, and the pleasantness takes on a kind of general tone. Some smooches are better than others, but overall, kissing is nice. The particulars slip away.
 
Except for the first. No one ever forgets that kiss. If your first was with someone who has done it a few times before, don’t be too hurt when he does not remember your name. Also, don’t be afraid to be a little in love with him for the rest of your life.
 
The same goes for concerts.
 
Mine was Go Go Live at the Capital Centre, 1987.
 
We claim our own music at one critical moment. We never get that moment a second time, and we never forget it. Our tastes belong to our families and then, perhaps, to our friends. At some point, we find the direction of our own discernment, and we lean in. The choice does not feel so important when it is happening. Aren’t we just seizing an opportunity and just jumping into the pleasure of noise? Such things are usually not planned according to a grand strategy. Like that kiss. The moment appears, someone offers up a ticket. We enter that melee independent, freely choosing. “I love this,” we say, and without reading the terms and conditions, sign on to a lifetime membership among the acolytes.
 
Any concert is an anonymous experience. Hell, they happen time and again, and thousands if not tens of thousands of people converge. The experience of gathering into theater or stadium washes each spectator free of name and history, crushing everyone together into a single, teeming mass. An organism fills the concert hall. This unified Fan rises and falls under the sway of the music.
 
Also, though, nothing is more personal than that first time. Ask anyone about that earliest solo adventure, and she will call up the whole of the sensation with her eyes flashing and cheeks warming. This one clanging, bopping, overcrowded moment several lifetimes ago is burned into bone and still lives there. It still stings. The first concert marks us. Even if most of what we feel is embarrassment or lingering terror at becoming lost in it, even if we have no recollection of a single song, we still feel it. It pulses against skin and eardrum and vision as if Right Now. The echo is almost indistinguishable from the shout.
 
I was fourteen, a freshman in high school, and as dumb as a box of rocks. What did I know about the world outside the safe confines of my Bethesda neighborhood? Most of the time, I could not even identify my own tastes until my more self-possessed peers decided for me. (Guess jeans? My favorite!) From time to time, I was able to zero in on exactly what I liked. In these exceedingly rare cases, I could neither justify the preference nor find the company to commiserate, but I did not budge.
 
My one self-defined pleasures was Rap music. That was all we knew to call it then, that infant form of Hip Hop. Whatever it was, it worked its way right down into my bloodstream.
 
In the mid-80’s, Rap was popping up everywhere. Run-D.M.C. was hitting top 40. Salt ‘n’ Pepa were giving the girls a voice, Public Enemy was inciting rebellion, Ice-T was birthing gangster rap into being. Rap made me loosen up parts I did not even know I had. There I was, this dingbat white girl busting a move in her bedroom, I’m like Tyson icin’ I’m a soldier at war, I’m makin’ sure you don’t try to battle me no more. I was far too high on the beat to notice that I did not have the first idea what a “glock” was, let alone how to use one.
 
None of us is any single entity during adolescence (thank heavens). I was also bopping on the Pom Pom squad to Tiffany and could sing every word to every Madonna song. UB40 had me grooving. I would crank Donna Summer and bounce the pictures off the walls. My only criterion for falling in love with a band was this: Can I dance to it? Because once this girl started moving, there was no way she was going to stop.
 
This may not be true anymore, but in 1987, every bonehead in the ‘burbs knew how to work a radio dial. When I grew bored of my cassette tapes and 45s, I could roll on down to strange new territory on the FM frequency. Sometime around then, WPGC began playing the kind of music I did not hear at the school dances. I had no idea what it was, but it got my rear end in gear. It met the conditions for dance-ability then carried the bar up into the stratosphere.
 
Whatever I was hearing was like rap, but more vital. Juicy. It had this funk. Its cool down-tempo percussion and uh-huh beat made it hard to sit still. I had no idea what it was and I did not think to ask. What did it matter? All a girl has to do is listen and feel and let it shake loose the spine.
 
An older boy in art class razzed me to no end about my musical tastes. I was not so sheltered I couldn’t see him for the foul-mouthed Neanderthal he was. He favored country and kept trying to engage me in a stultifying argument about the superiority of his preferred musical form. To locate myself as far from his world as possible, I immersed myself in hip hop. Also, this drowned him out. I credit his blend of racism, misogyny, and idiocy with expanding my rap vocabulary exponentially during my first year of high school. (It took me another decade to realize I could actually like Garth Brooks without selling my soul).
 
This dude knew some other dude who had tickets to a Go Go concert. Go Go, it turns out, only sounds like the name of an 80’s pop-girl band. It is actually that funked out music I was discovering down the radio dial. Go Go is a homegrown DC genre of music with R&B roots and a dancehall style, though I did not even know that much at the time. (Check out a sample here).
 
The guy with the tickets went to another school, but he was old enough to drive and I guess he was having as much trouble finding a date to the concert as I would have in the same circumstances. So, without even meeting first, he showed up at my house on that weekend night and whisked me off to Prince George’s County. It amazes me now to think how this could have occurred. My parents must have been more consumed by their own drama than I can even imagine. Off I went, into the wide-open night with a complete stranger.
 
God bless their distraction. What a thing it was to walk into that giant arena and join 15,000 complete strangers in stomping and whooping to those rat-a-tat beats! I knew the sounds through the tinny bands of my radio, but here it was in the deafening flesh. Lights and voices and very real people on stage and more people pressing in on every side. My companion had scored tickets on the floor, and I was standing up on the seat, dancing like a fool. I was aware that I was younger and whiter than anyone else there, but I didn’t know enough to care. I just figured if I liked something, I was allowed to like it openly and shamelessly. That’s the privilege of being from a certain background, I suppose. I may have been far dumber at fourteen than I am now. I was also bolder. It did not occur to me that music may not belong to a person who has claimed it. Those rhythms were mine because they spoke to me, and so I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
 
The lineup included a few I knew, like Rare Essence, Junkyard Band, and Experience Unlimited (who later hit the charts with “Da Butt,” but that song had not been hatched when they hit the stage). I had not previously heard Hot Cold Sweat or Little Benny. I fell in steamy, pure love with each and every one of them that night, and chanted along in the call-and-response, and got up offa my thing, just like I was told.
 
Chuck Brown exploded through a fanfare of music and lights, jamming into the screaming adoration of the audience. Even then, they called him the Godfather of Go Go, and he lit up that whole arena. I remember feeling like I was a part of something I should have understood but did not. What is a girl to do but step aboard and go for a ride? I got up and got down – way too far down for a skinny-assed kid – but I felt it all. My throat was as sore as my feet, but that was only later. Inside the night, inside the music, it was only the funk. It was only the Right Now.
 
They razed the Capital Center a decade ago, and Go Go had slipped into retirement a few years before that. Today, just a few miles down the road, a memorial service for Chuck Brown took place. He died last week at 75. It’s a sad, strange thing to think of all that flash and groove going quiet. I am sure I am not alone in claiming his music as the soundtrack for a first or for a whole chapter of firsts. On body, city, time, and even on me, that man left his mark. Just by playing his music, just by sending it out to the crowd, he gave this place sound in motion.
 
Go Go has been making its return to the District over the past few years. I have not had the courage to make my way in and see what the fuss is about. I know I will have to make the pilgrimage soon. We never forget the first one. The sting it leaves is still hot and deep. Even if the music does not remember me, it will always be my one true love. Chuck Brown, thank you for that kiss.

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You can read Natalie Hopkinson’s tribute to Chuck Brown’s role in shaping Go Go here: http://www.theroot.com/views/chuck-brown-dies-75?page=0,0