There was a song by the band Looking Glass that poured out of every car radio the summer I graduated high school in 1972. It was called Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) and if you listened to the melody streaming through an open window on a hot summer day, you could hear the waves crashing in the background as the barmaid Brandy awaited her lover’s return from the sea. It was a song and a summer of endless possibilities with no guarantees for the future – only innocent hopes and lofty dreams. With high school behind us and college waiting on the horizon, it was the most freedom my friends and I would ever feel, and the closest we would ever be.
On Friday nights, there was a gathering held at a local park which we called the Canteen. I don’t remember who sponsored the weekly event – maybe the school, maybe a church group – but it succeeded in keeping the town’s youth occupied on the first evening of the weekend. I was fairly oblivious back then about who was responsible for my fun; I regularly attended CYO dances with my friends thinking the initials stood for Children’s Youth Organization. It wasn’t until years later I discovered the C was for Catholic, and I was probably the only Jewish teen regularly in attendance. You’d think the fact that the dances were held at St. Patrick’s Church would have been the tipoff. But maybe oblivious is unduly harsh. Perhaps I was just on the cutting edge of diversity consciousness.
The Canteen featured a local band every week that always covered the current hits by Cream, Led Zeppelin, and especially Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, an endless droning cloud of noise lasting half an hour. In 1972 we believed the title’s translation was In the Garden of Eden sung by people too stoned to enunciate, and that suited us just fine because we knew that sneaking a beer behind a tree and puffing our maturity-enhancing Marlboros were memories we would look back on.
Husband and I returned from Florida recently for the last time. My father-in-law passed away at 89 after being hospitalized following a fall. I wrote about this a little in All the Right Moves, but what I didn’t write was what a king of the jungle Husband’s Dad was. He had the familiar biography of a child of immigrants: two brothers; wartime service; taking over the family butcher shop in the Bronx because he was the only son who would; 63 years of marriage; three children, one of whom I married on a splendid November day ten years ago. What the man never did was complain – ever. His can-do attitude was unstoppable. He was a salesman who lived his life by the golden rule of sales: treat the customer right and he’ll keep coming back. Make that your philosophy and you are In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida every day.
It rained in Florida the day we flew back to New York, and Husband and I sat in the airport watching drops of water pelt the motionless planes out on the runway. We spoke of childhoods spent watching our Dads leave every morning for work, secure in the knowledge that they’d return at night. Until the day they no longer would, and then the ones who always caught us when we fell would be gone, and suddenly we would be the elders.
At night when the bars close down, Brandy walks through a silent town, and loves a man who’s not around, she still can hear him say. . .
Daughter’s Featured Fotos offer Irresistible Sights at the Easter Parade
all dressed up
with matching shoes
largest. hat. ever.
a bunny and his peeps