1986. I’m on a plane to Seattle, and the Seattle airport is fogged in, and we’re diverted to Portland. I’ve been minding my own business for the last six hours, but for some reason, at this point, as the plane lands in Portland, I strike up a conversation with the woman across the aisle from me. It turns out that the way they’re going to get us up to Seattle is by bus – yellow school bus, specifically, you know, the ones with enough leg room for 10-year-olds.
She was a nurse, I remember that much. And I was on the way to a professional conference, and there were a bunch of colleagues on the plane with me, and for the next three hours, in this tiny yellow school bus in the fog, I avoided my colleagues and chatted with this nurse, and found myself fairly intrigued. And then we got to Seattle, and there was a luggage scrum, and she was – poof – gone.
I found myself haunted – not terribly haunted, but at least a little bit. And I thought about that incident for ten solid years, and finally wrote a song about it. I still play that song – it’s the oldest song of mine I still play regularly, and I love it for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that there’s not a single measure of vamp – no intro, no end. The first note of the song is a vocal, and so is the last. It ain’t funny – there’s nothing funny about someone vanishing into the fog after you’ve had a crush on her for three hours – but it’s a great song.
And so here I am, spring 2013, waiting for my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, to rouse herself from her slumber so we can go walk on the beach while everyone else is celebrating Easter, rehearsing for my gig at Main St. Cafe in Groton next week – you are coming, aren’t you? – and I’m standing in my kitchen, rockin’ out to “Seattle”, and suddenly it hits me: why the hell did she vanish? I’m listening to my own song – my own damn song – and here’s a question it poses that I can’t answer.
So I thought about it for a moment, and now I have an answer, and I don’t like it very much.
The charming and stylish leading man who stands before you, well, he wasn’t always so charming and stylish. I was 24 in 1986, but in dating years, I was, oh, three. I had a history of latching onto women for dear life – sometimes hopelessly, sometimes inappropriately, never successfully. I latched onto my first girlfriend in 1988, and that sorta worked, until it didn’t, partially because we were just terribly wrong for each other, and partially because she had her own pile of issues, and partially because, well, I’d latched onto her for dear life. Last night I was watching the original “Star Trek” on MeTV, and the episode was about a creature, the last of her kind, that needed salt to survive, and she sucked it out of humans with these hideous suction cups on her hands, and left these round red marks on her victims. And so it occurs to me – from my stylish, charming vantage point of 2013, SWMBT peacefully snoring in the next room – that maybe, just maybe, that nurse vanished in 1986 because she could tell that I was a desperate little boy with suckers on the ends of my fingers.
Maybe.
We’ll never know. Most of history is never recorded; that nurse’s thoughts are her own, and who knows, maybe her boyfriend picked her up, or she was late to her grandmother’s funeral, or maybe she was hiding behind the pay phones until I went away. Music can take you back to a moment; it can also reveal, like “Rashomon”, that you can only see that moment from your own point of view.