And It Was All Yellow

 

I don't want to write about the present or the immediate future. It just makes me feel some kind of way. I've been looking back a lot more. There is something comforting about the past. It is etched in stone, unchangeable and familiar. Happy times passed are blessings that can be revisited when times are hard. When my children are struggling or having a bad attitude, I close my eyes and remember them little. How I would rock with my oldest and bury my face into her neck and smell her baby smell. How my youngest would crawl into my lap and rest her curls on my chest, and reach up and play with my ear lobes. It doesn't matter how old they are, I will always think of them like that. 

A smell, a song, a place can just bring you back to a moment in time that has passed. This week, I was driving home and Yellow came on the radio. It's mid-August and it was like I was suddenly in New York City. 

It's so weird that we live thousands of days and we don't remember most of them. But others we remember so clearly, every detail. Births, deaths, times that are especially happy and times that are especially sad. That day in New York was one of those days burned into my memory forever. 

It was the end of August 2001. A week before my husband left for the ARMY- which was August 29th. We decided that we wanted to go to New York City for the day. It was me, my husband, and two guy friends that we worked with. I was 17. He picked me up early that morning, in his white Saturn station wagon and we drove to Mount Holly. We loaded onto a coach bus. It was like a party bus with tables. We were so pumped. The boys mostly talked about going to the Virgin Records store to get some obscure CD. That is a very old-fashioned statement. 

It was only an hour and a half drive into Manhattan. We got off the bus and made our way to Times Square. I had been to New York City a few times before - mostly for school trips. I'd been to the top of the Empire State Building and seen a Broadway show but there was something different about being there - young and alone with my boyfriend and friends, just exploring the city. 

We made our way to Times Square. The streets were bustling with people and everything was just so BIG. All I did was look UP - at the forest of buildings. I pointed to the World Trade Center Towers. They seemed to reach up to the heavens. I recall pointing at them and saying, "Look! They are the tallest buildings in the city!" I remembered that moment as I watched them fall a few weeks later. He was already gone by then. 

It was a hot day- but not too hot. Not sticky hot. It was hot enough to feel like summer. There were so many little shops. I wanted to shop for clothes. The boys had no interest in that at all. There was a small clothing store just by Virgin Records. "I want to stop in here. I'll meet you there," I told them. They were like, "Okay." Then, I was all alone. 

I stepped into this clothing store that, I swear to you, was barely bigger than a walk-in closet. It had so many cute and funky things and I wanted to buy everything. It wasn't the kind of stuff you'd find in South Jersey. I fell in love with this cherry red sweater vest. I love that sweater vest. I still own it and I still wear it, multiple times a year. My 14 year old discovered it this year, and she low-key stole it from me. It's hanging in her closet right now. I'll get it back someday. 

Once I was done with my shopping, I headed over to Virgin Records. It was larger than life. You walked in and it was massive. There was an escalator! There seemed to be rows and rows of endless CDs. I meandered through the store, looking around for my boyfriend. I found him in the electronica section. He never went to raves but he liked the rave-type music. When we went to check out, there was a huge rack dedicated to Coldplay's Parachutes album. They were the hot, new band. Ever since then, whenever I hear Yellow, I am standing in the Virgin Records store in Times Square admiring the rack of Coldplay CDs again. 

We left Virgin Records and we ate. I don't remember what we had for lunch. That is the one detail that is missing. After lunch, we headed to Central Park. There was a man selling pretzels from a cart and there were people walking dogs, couples on blankets, and joggers passing by. We were getting tired, I was getting the post-lunch haze. We sought rest on a big rock. I sat on the rock next to my husband and leaned against him. The boys talked, but I just watched. The sky was crystal blue and the leaves and grass were this vibrant emerald green. There was a slight breeze and the tree branches swayed like they were dancing around us. The city towered behind the trees. There was a boy playing catch with his father. It's weird, that I can't tell you what I had for dinner last Tuesday but I will forever remember watching them. The boy had on a blue baseball cap, and squinted just slightly as he followed the ball into his glove. 

It is a moment I think I'll remember forever. I was happy and peaceful and in this place that so beautiful, it was like being in a movie. I could have stayed there all afternoon, but we moved on. 

We started to make our way back to where the bus station was. We stopped at Barnes and Noble. It was two stories high and had a much better selection than the bookstores of my hometown. I purchased the complete works of E.E. Cummings. 

By the time we left the bookstore, the sky had turned grey. Then, all of a sudden it started to rain. Hard. Torrential rain. We tried to get onto a bus, since that was the closet thing to us where we could seek shelter but we were immediately kicked off because we didn't have any bus tokens. 

There was a Hooters close-by and we made a run for it. When we stepped into the restaurant, we were all soaked and laughing. There was barely anyone there, it was that weird time between lunch and dinner. We decided to stay and get a snack and wait out the rain. We were seated at a table near the bar. There was a middle-aged man sitting there. 

We sat down and talked and were just being ourselves and the man seemed interested in us. He asked us questions. "Where you kids from?" in a thick, stereotypical New York accent. "You kids like MTV?" he asked. Of course we did. You weren't a real teenager if you didn't come home from school, grab a snack and sit down to watch Total Request Live with Carson Daly. We told him that we did. "You know what I call it?" he replied. "I call it EMPTY-V. Get it?" and he laughed and laughed at his own joke. It was a dad joke and none of us laughed with him. He talked about "young people today," not in a way that was offensive per se, but there was something about the decline of morality that bothered him that was reflected in us. 

It has always been that way. Every generation thinks that theirs was better than the current one. The youth are vilified in a lot of ways and discounted for their lack of wisdom. But it's not their fault, and it wasn't ours. When you are young you don't know what you don't know. When you are young, deep down you feel like you'll be that way forever because it's all you've known your entire life up until then. We were young and wild and free that day and nothing that man said to us could have changed that. 

It did stop raining and we made our way back to the bus station, dodging puddles and trying to shrug off the underlying anxiety of missing our ride home. We piled into the bus and collapsed into the seats, tired from our day of exploring the city. The ride home seemed shorter than the ride there. I pulled my book from the bag and read the entire way. The boys i mean are not refined was my favorite: https://genius.com/E-e-cummings-the-boys-i-mean-are-not-refined-annotated

The boys certainly were not refined then and I don't imagine they are much more now, 20 years later. 

It was dusk by the time we rolled into Mount Holly. We unloaded the bus and loaded into the station wagon. We listened to the new Gorillaz CD the whole way home. My husband had this HUGE binder of CDS. I swear it weighed 10 pounds, sheet after sheet of shiny circles. His collection was enviable. The only good part about him leaving for the AMRY was that he was going to give me his binder of CDs for safekeeping. We laughed and joked around the entire way home. We were back in town before my curfew so I went back to his house. Our friends left and we walked into the house and it was empty. It was unusual for that time of the evening that everyone would be gone. 

It seemed like a gift, the perfect ending to the perfect day. The lights in the living room were dim and the house was silent except for the raindrops on the roof. That was in August 19 years ago. 

That's strange to think - all the time between then and now is a blur. My children are almost the age I was then. The other night, I laid in bed with my daughter. She didn't protest. I studied her face. "You only have one more first day of school left. Like, in your whole life. That's crazy." She smiled. "You're getting old." She always tells me that. "It's weird because sometimes, in my head, I still think I'm the same as I was when I was your age. Then, when I am around you and your sister, I think No, I'm definitely not." I don't think she understood what I was trying to say, "Did you have wine tonight?" she asked. I hadn't. But she'll know what I mean someday.

I should feel different. I know more things. But like practical things. I can cook a turkey without checking the internet and I can file taxes and get stains out of blouses. But I actually know less. Things are less certain. That day in New York, everything was perfect and I was so sure about everything. Life is so black and white when you are young. Sometimes things are complicated only because they make them be so. For instance, teenagers with relationship problems are so funny. Like, you can just break up. Nothing will happen. You don't need to sell a house or figure out kids every other weekend. You only have to keep yourself alive and you have people facilitating that. Your body parts are still in their original places....You can't appreciate the simpleness of life until it gets messy. Until you have children of your own. And once-in-a-century pandemics happen. 

Maybe I am still that girl, walking down the sidewalk in Times Square, looking UP. I still have some of those things from that day with me - the boy, the red sweater vest, the poem. Even the Coldplay album- on Spotify, of course.