Who knows what’s real when you’re fifteen? I think I fell in love, but it might have been anything from brain chemicals to the Lord God Almighty. I’d known her for a while, and one time she and her Dad asked me to go along with them to a turtle feed about and hour and a half from Austin and I remember how nervous and excited I was when they picked me up in a Winnebago with an old filing cabinet laying in the aisle. I think that’s where I sat on the way there, and answered her Dad’s questions and tried not to stare at her while she played with the radio and sat crossed-legged in her seat. We finally arrived at a lodge in the woods somewhere and the inside was decorated with turtle shells and had long tables and a lot of people and we ate fried turtle and coleslaw and fruit salad and any flavor Shasta you wanted. There was pie for desert. She and I sat together and talked and then walked around outside and talked and I don’t remember what about or even if I talked at all but I can see her shoes in the pine needles and her hair pushed behind her ear as clear as day. When it was dark her Dad found us and said we’d better go and he handed me the keys and said he needed to lie down. I was fifteen. It was dark, we were 90 miles from home in a 24 foot Winnebago with a broken gas gauge and I hadn’t really been paying attention to how we’d gotten there and never thought I’d have to navigate home. I said I only had a learner’s permit and I’d never driven an RV before. He said I’d be fine and that he was right beside me, in a muffled voice from the bed in the back. But she kind of knew the way, and once I figured out where the key went and she found a good station on the radio we set off. It was like driving a ship, the way it rocked and reeled from side to side and the windows were down and the radio was loud and we had to almost shout at each other and I can’t think of what we said but I was as happy as I’d ever been up to that time and her Dad slept on and about 3 hours later I was disappointed to see the lights of Austin heave into view. When I parked in my driveway her Dad woke up and thanked me and I thanked him and we shook hands and my Dad came outside to say hi and ask if the turtle tasted like chicken, which it had, and suddenly she and her Dad were leaving and I was waving at her. Waving at her when I should have been hugging her. Waving and not kissing, not saying goodbye or can we not say goodbye, waving like a fool when I only wanted to get back in that Winnebago and leave her Dad there and she and I would just go and go and go. But I was fifteen, I wonder why it’s so clear tonight what happened then? My own son will be fifteen in a couple years … I wonder if I’ll remember to tell him that he’ll need to take his joy where and when he finds it? Anyway, I’m lucky and grateful to still be here right now, camping in the yard with my kids and packing my stuff for a visit to Minocqua WI where I get to pick a few tunes with the Rucksack Revolution and then head for the Nippersink Festival on Friday and Grand Rapids MN on Saturday for the Forest Jam and then the Catfish River Music Festival in Stoughton WI (a little zig-zagging, I know) and next Wednesday I get to reunite with Christian and Dave for a Devil’s Flying Machine show at the Red Herring in Duluth. Enjoy the sun, everybody.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 03:18:51 +0000
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