Old and Embarrassing Things

So, this move is coming up- it's gigantic, probably the biggest move I'll ever have. I'm going to England. It's going to be fantastic, except when it's not, such as now. The particulars of moving your whole house (in the U.K. they call it "moving house"! So exotic!) are ridiculous, many of them small and annoying and almost too many to count, like Lilliputians. One of those little buggers- running up to my foot and stabbing its' tiny spear into my big toe- is old stuff.

The house is already littered with drifts of house-jam, as if I'd been packing for fifteen minutes every day and then just walked away from it (which is precisely what I've been doing.) This would be fine if I'd managed to come back to any of the previously started boxes, but I prefer to go all haphazard, grabbing the pieces of a dubious kitchen appliance and throwing them into a box of an ill-advised size, like a jewelry box or something. It keeps me fresh to walk into a room of confused moving materials wrapped around some but not all of these kitchen appliances or toiletries from the late 90's or mislaid piano keys. Naturally, when I say "fresh" I mean "nervous", but that's how I roll. My brain tends to...um...wander during these moments of "freshness," and it strikes me: all of the shit I'm pulling out now says a great deal about the stuff I was enthusiastic about some years ago. Like Rod Stewart.

 I took the girl ice skating today, and we'd both been looking forward to it for a week- I for the bliss of speediness (or perceived speediness- it doesn't matter) and she for the opportunity to wear her white mohair Hello Kitty vest in an appropriate environment, for once. The music they play is, naturally, a horrible radio station that seems satisfied in its' mission to take the worst pop songs from the "70's 80's 90's and right now" and mash them up into a rancid aural stew, with commercials. I tried to adopt the coping strategy of one of the many, many tweens that were on the ice by acting like I didn't care about the shitty music or the fact that I was wearing mom jeans, or that I could only skate well in one direction as long as I didn't try to pull any funny stuff, like stopping.  After many a round with my daughter holding on to me and all of the classic slaptick comedy that that required, she sat out and I skated on, totally not caring about what others thought, like, at all. It was fun: faking nonchalance kind of freed me to be secretly enthusiastic about songs I hadn't heard in decades, songs that under normal circumstances- such as being stuck in traffic with a small passel of fifth graders who've stormed the car radio- would have made me literally barf. There was a Led Zeppelin song, and a song by Asia, and some Taylor Swift. I took put my back into the pretense of apathy and remembered how freeing it was to be a tween at an ice rink, gratefully merging the fake with the real and genuinely not caring for whole minutes at a time: what a rush! What passion! The relief that used to come with those moments of emotional holiday was so fierce and so unusual that it used to make me cry (as long as there was no one around.)

So there I was, actually savoring the memory of being a teenager, when the song "Young Turks" by Rod Stewart came on. It may have been called "Young Hearts" or "Turk Love" or "Turkish Love Affair, Young Mix" or some such- I didn't remember the name, but I remembered the lyrics far too well- and at first my adult consciousness descended and I scolded myself for having those lyrics stored in the head but not know where the house is and yadda yadda. But the secret enthusiasm wasn't to be dismissed, and I thought of my friends and I at one of our homes, listening to "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" by RS, and commenting on how sexy we did, in fact, find him. Gross, but we were twelve so we didn't know any better, and really the whole point was to talk about desire with a safe and disco-oriented lightning Rod Stewart (yes, I meant to make that pun. You're welcome!) So this memory was a safe one, then: a place from back in the day when I wasn't abjectly disappointed in myself for something stupid and tweenish, like how my thighs looked or the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, I would never really want to be a Junior Varsity cheerleader. I was with friends; there was consummate giggling that left sore belly muscles for days afterward; Rod Stewart was sexy.

Ok, ok, even then I knew that he wasn't sexy. I was more of a Stewart Copeland fan, myself. I still have a pin that has a picture of him being much more sexy than RS, should one ever wish to make that comparison. My pin was, in fact, one of my old and embarrassing things that was unearthed a few months ago- I stuck it on the cork board that's buried in the office's blockage. I am joyful in a provisional way, because I recalled the way I felt sometimes as a teenager that didn't involve me bleeding Chi all over the rural New Jersey landscape. Right now, to expand on that beautiful theme, I plan to sing along to every Rod Stewart song I hear.