March 22, 2003

From An American Tune

The foreboding she felt as war in Iraq grew closer, more inevitable, deepened her
confusion and despair. Massive peace demonstrations around the world, petitions against the war flooded the internet, claims of faulty intelligence made by imminently trustworthy people did nothing to stop the clock ticking toward the showdown that most believed, for better or worse, had been planned for in the days after September eleventh.

When it finally came, Nora and Tom watched, mesmerized: the president at the podium
in his dark business suit, behind him a long, empty, red-carpeted corridor. Clever planning, they agreed: the image of him framed by the doorway, strong, silent, completely alone. When he spoke, the arrogant, in-your-face tone of the past months was gone and in its place the voice of reason. No smart-ass comments about Freedom Fries, no bragging about shock and awe, no threats about evil empires.

“My fellow citizens,” he said. “Events in Iraq have now reached the final days of
decision.” Then, lying as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had done before him, made his case for war.

In the morning Nora turned on the “Today Show,” to find that, though the war had not officially started, a logo had been assigned to it—and, beneath that logo, flanked by a huge map of the Middle East, Katie Couric, in a black suit, interviewed two generals, who touted amazing, “intelligent” bombs and, with obvious difficulty, restrained their enthusiasm describing the M.O.A.B.: “Mother of All Bombs.”

“A last resort,” one said.

“Of course, we hope not to use it,” said the other

They made Nora think of watching “Apocalypse Now” with Tom a few nights before. Robert Duvall crowing, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”

The whole broadcast mirrored the surreal quality of that movie as it proceeded. Duvall himself was on the show, teaching Katie how to tango—revealing spike heels and lacy black tights beneath the surprisingly short skirt of the black suit she’d worn in the presence of the generals. There was a feature on Saddam’s luxury bunker, another on arms brokering—dozens of men in a Baghdad gun store testing the heft of shoulder-held weapons, one of them cocking a pistol toward the camera “U.S.A,” he said, grinning. Another on a Chinook-flying grandmother with gray, coiffed hair, an American flag pin on her Army fatigues.

In Rockefeller Plaza, the usual screamers competed for a moment onscreen.

“Hey, Al! I’m twenty-one today!” a kid called.

His friend held up a cardboard Wisconsin Badger.

But Al headed for a woman holding up a baby in a pink snowsuit.

“This is an anti-war baby,” she said into the microphone, and he backed away.

Back in the studio, Elmo reassured the children. “Do you ever feel upset when you see or
hear something scary?” he asked in his sweet, scratchy little voice. “Elmo does, too! Talk to a grown-up! Draw a picture! Tell a story! Or—” He waved his fuzzy red arms wildly and hollered, “Wubawubawuba!”

“Stay calm,” a human citizen of Sesame Street advised parents. “Keep a routine.”

“Give them a big kiss, too!” Elmo said.

Perhaps strangest of all, there were regular updates on a “Today” employee undergoing a
colonoscopy. “She’s under conscious sedation,” the doctor said. “Relaxed, comfortable. But she thinks she’s awake, she wants to talk.” He smiled. “That’s what conscious sedation is.”


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Blowin' in the Wind

Long, straight blond hair: who doesn’t want it? I spent my senior year in high school growing mine out just past my shoulders, getting ready for college—and now I’m here I think I look at least moderately cool in my madras shirts, wheat jeans and penny loafers, that long, straight, blond hair blowing in the wind. But do I want to be Mary, or that Surfer Girl the Beach Boys sing about with such longing?

“Surfer Girl” better suits the world of fraternity parties I’ve fallen into, even though Bloomington is about as far from an ocean as you can be. But, making my way to the Commons alone, I often peer down the stairs into the Kiva, where the Beatniks hang out, smoking, drinking coffee, reading poetry, and talking about Serious Things. Thin, soulful-looking guys with beards, girls with Mary hair, like mine, perch on bar stools with their guitars and sing woeful, apocalyptic songs: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

And a new one that just came out—“Eve of Destruction”—which I love.

Steve thinks it’s stupid and melodramatic.

He thinks the people who hang out at the Kiva are weird. “Baggers,” he and his friends call them, after the green army surplus bags they sling over their shoulder. “Goddamn Commies,” they say.

We almost argue about this, but don’t.

The thing is, I know that my idea of Beatniks—or Baggers—is a ridiculous mix of Maynard G. Krebs, on the “Dobie Gillis Show;” Kookie, the hip parking lot attendant in “77 Sunset Strip;” “Hootenanny,” and sneaking down to Greenwich Village with some friends on a high school trip to New York last year, ecstatic to discover Bleecker Street, where there were real Beatniks and music drifted into the crisp autumn evening from the Bitter End, The Village Gate, the Café au Go Go, places where I knew the grooviest folk singers played.

Nonetheless, part of me daydreams of dressing in black and heading down to the Kiva to listen to bongos and revel in the coming apocalypse. The other part, the girl I became the very first day I got to campus, says, “Are you out of your mind?

I follow the music into the Commons, where the jukebox is always playing the Beatles, the Supremes, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, the Righteous Brothers, Martha and the Vandellas.

Sonny and Cher, “I Got You, Babe.”

And admit to myself that, at least right now, all I really want to do is dance.

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Where Were You When This Song Was Playing on the Radio?

Who hasn’t felt that weird slippage of time that occurs when a song comes on the radio and, all of a sudden, you’re in a whole other time—in a car, your teenage bedroom, a classroom; at a dance or football game; on a picnic blanket, making out by a lake—and that song is playing, the person you were then is listening to it. The jolt of pure emotion you feel is so real, so visceral that you feel disoriented when the song is over, not quite certain who you are now. If music is in a novel, the reader hears the song as it played in her own life at the same time she’s hearing play it in the characters' lives, and this triggers memories and emotions that complicate and deepen the novel’s effect in a way that the author could never predict or hope to understand.

Novels trigger all kinds of time travel, connecting us to moments in our own past and coloring our impression of the story on the page. In fact, all things being equal, the nature and quality of time travel a novel evokes in us may explain why we fall in love with some books and only admire others.

Of course, I didn’t know it then, but An American Tune began on September 12, 1965, the day I arrived in Bloomington to begin my freshman year at Indiana University. That evening, I walked to the Union with a bunch of girls I’d just me. We got Cokes, then sat down in the Commons to check out the scene. A friend from my hometown came through the revolving door with some of his fraternity brothers, and they stopped at our table. We chatted. One of them invited me to a party the next night—the guy I would eventually marry.

I don’t remember what song was playing on the jukebox, but the song that takes me right back to that moment is “1-2-3,” by Len Barry, one of those goofy, before-the-revolution songs of the early sixties. Maybe because it was the song that always seemed to be playing on the jukebox that fall when I hung out at the Commons or just passed through it on my way to class and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Maybe because Steve fairly quickly confessed that he had fallen in love with me at first sight and persisted in assuming that I would fall in love with him, too—until I did.

“One two three/Oh, that's how element'ry/It's gonna be/Come on let's fall in love/It's easy (it's so easy)/Like takin' candy (like takin' candy) from a baby.”

Oh, my God, I thought, typing them. They’re so sappy. It’s embarrassing. Nonetheless, here I am again, that girl walking through a door, into the rest of her life.

Today, the 47th anniversary of our first date, seems a good time to launch a series of blog posts about the music in An American Tune—little meditations about how my own American tune morphed into the American tune of a girl I might have been.

When you read these meditations (and the book, please!), I hope they’ll transport you to moments when the same songs songs were playing in your life. If they do, it would be so cool if you would share those memories here.

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