Back To The Future

In my new life I am trying desperately to figure out what I would do if I could go back in time and be young and carefree. Now that my children spend almost half their weekends with their dad, I have about 48 hours to be young and some responsible version of carefree every other week. This is a lot easier now that I live in Houston, where there are plenty of options. Something as simple as the rodeo, which is a pretty big deal here, is difficult with kids. I have three, which triples the cost of funnel cakes and turkey legs, and two of them have severe allergies. Ever seen a detailed ingredient list on a carnival food stand? Me neither. I was lucky enough to get to see every inch of the rodeo this year as an adult without my kids, and even got to see a concert that night they would have absolutely hated. A concert! An artist I’d never seen before! It was fantastic.

I play music all day every day. It’s been fun to revisit the music of my youth as a much, much older woman. There’s something about a good song that can take you back to a time and place with just a few notes. It’s not always good, sometimes it reminds you of a breakup or moving away from friends, but songs I’d completely forgotten about come back to me word for word.

Professional organizing is a skill you have to hone, so I revisited my already sparse and tidy closets to work on editing and sorting. There wasn’t much to do, admittedly, but it’s a good reminder that you can’t know what’s best for a client or understand their reasoning for keeping their wretched great aunt’s chipped teapot – sometimes you just have to accept that people are attached to things that don’t make sense. I have two mix tapes from high school and no way to play them. I don’t want to get rid of them because they were gifts – essentially a time capsule – and I have very few keepsakes as it is. But who owns a cassette player in 2024?

Now, I do. The rule of bizarre keepsakes is that you must respect them if you want to keep them. If you collect fragile figurines, show them respect and display them beautifully. If you won’t throw away the tapes your friends made you, listen to them. I’m so glad I did. An old boyfriend made me a tape as a going away gift before I moved, and I completely forgot he recorded a message at the beginning and wrote a rap for me. Talk about music transporting you to another time and place. He was really into music as well and is a writer now, which doesn’t surprise me at all. Even as a thirty-eight year old woman the rap he wrote blew me away. I forgot how brilliant he was. I can’t believe I nearly threw the tape away.

I don’t keep a lot. Memories are sufficient, but my memory is actually terrible. Old friends will reconnect and start playing, “remember when…” and I rarely do. And then I make a new friend who loves music and says, “have you heard of this band?” and I of course say no, never. Then they play a song and, not only do I recognize it, I know most of the lyrics. My memory for bands and song names is abysmal, but a good hook lasts a lifetime. Listening to songs I had completely forgotten is so intense I can smell the wood floors of my boyfriend’s house, the smoke of my friend’s hookah pipe, and the sour musk of the Moscow metro. The rock music I used to love takes me right back to black plastic chokers and studded belts on low rise jeans, making angsty eye contact with my sweet and deep-feeling friends because, like, nobody understood us, man.

I don’t know why I decided to change my taste in music when I got married. I still like a lot of rap (not new rap – I’m too old to learn new artists), but barely touched the rock music until the last few years. You guys, those bands we listened to? They kept making music even when we stopped listening to them. Bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit didn’t just replay that same album we remember for twenty-five years. They made more. Trying to catch up is overwhelming, but even though it’s new to me, it feels nostalgic.

I hope to see a lot more concerts in the future, since I finally live in a city that artists regularly travel to, if only they could all agree to come to town when my kids are with their dad. If a big band came to El Paso and I missed it (because we very rarely went to concerts) that was it. No one else I’d want to see would come for at least another year. Here, if a concert is on a weeknight and I can’t go, there will be another one I’d like to see next month. It gets a little messy – music makes my emotional and I cry every time I watch someone sing the national anthem at a sporting event – but its good for my soul.

Until I get to see every one of the bands I used to love, I fill my life with music, old and new. Some of it my kids even like. A good song can make me productive, help me unwind, lift me up, or break my heart. When you can’t articulate what you feel, there is a song that says it perfectly, reaching deep to access emotions otherwise unexplored.

If you’re clever and talented like my old boyfriend, you can write your own song to share your feelings. But please, don’t use a cassette tape. The second mixtape I found unraveled and was ruined when I tried to play it. I don’t even know who gave it to me, which is heartbreaking. Some things have changed for the better since I was young and carefree – just share your Spotify playlist with me and leave the ancient technology alone.