The windows are down and the top is back. The dry leaves are flying all around. My hair is loose. It’s flapping into my eyes and mouth and up my nose.
I don’t mind.
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – my Heartbreakers – are Echoing in my ears. They’re bringing me back to myself.
As I navigate a curve, the moon positions itself above the trees. It’s framed with the road below like a movie theater poster so picture-perfect that I let my eyes soak up the blue sea of sky. The milky white of the crescent above. The leaves of green in the trees…
Echo.
I’m hearing the lyrics anew. And they’ve got friends…
The words arrive with flashcards of faces – their eyes peering into my soul. Words spoken in tender, truthful moments echo, echo, echo, echo in my broken memory.
A voice speaks, speaking my fractured retracing of the passages of books I’ve read, and my soul sparks.
The fire in my belly is being stoked.
I see my grandmother’s face, pleading to me to see the sense the others do not. She looks to each of us girls this way – my sisters and I. And I’m eager to do as she pleases, to be her good girl and see beyond the words I don’t understand.
To feel it instead – her heart.
To know it enough to do something. Not to wait. Not to delay another day or let wishes go by…
Yes, wishes.
Hers. And now, mine, too.
So, go, she urges. Tend to your work, your responsibilities. And so, too, to strive … higher.
To act, where all felt overwhelming.
She’s looking at me like she’s proud. She’s nodding with that peaceful, easy grin on her face.
It’s easier now.
The slow crawl of the drumbeat… It’s begging me to speed up, but it holds me back, too.
Benmont Tench is lurching me forward on the keys, slow like sweet southern molasses.
I always remember him as Ben Mott, the way a child might mispronounce a sibling’s name. I blame Tom’s garbling tongue for that and smirk to myself.
That’s my Ben Mott. My applesauce partner in lunchtime crime, I snigger. I’m punching the keyboard with him.
C’mon, man. Let me burn.
I breathe with a fire that excites you. I’m humming with an electric charge behind the wheel. I could crash. You know it. I know it. It’s going to happen. But you’re so eager to see where this is going, you don’t want to slow me down. Something pulses inside you. It’s calling like the wild that begs to be freed from inside you.
Things are crashing and clashing.
Hey, no worries, man. I’m Davy Crockett in a coon-skin town, I sing. Popeye arms raised, elbows up. My feet are shuffling. And by the time the drumbeat comes to a close, I’m relieved by Rhino Skin. Then, I giggle like a child when certain lyrics remind me of the first time I heard them, caught unaware.
I wriggle and wiggle and loosen my shoulders to remember my strength. My courage. Theirs in me.
We’re getting there, my friend.
My sister. My mother. My aunt. My grandmother…
One more night. And then, another.