My friend Heather and I balance a boombox in her bedroom window, angling over the mountains to pick up the radio signal from the city. We take turns poised at the "record" button, waiting for the first descending chords, the hopeful rise, Darren Hayes' sweet, alt-pop voice promising to be our dream, our wish, our fantasy.
It's summer 1998, and we are 13. We are creatures of desire, and tonight we want a clear recording of "Truly, Madly, Deeply" by Savage Garden.
Neither of us owns the CD or has the cash to buy it. Even if we did, it's easier to record from the radio than drive 50 miles to the mall. The song comes on, and we restrain our swoons enough to keep the boombox in the window, to keep the tape rolling.
My son H and I run errands around town, the radio tuned to the classic rock station. I try to show off by knowing all the bands and songs — that's the Who, that's Foghat, that's Springsteen, obviously. My husband likes to tease me that I have an 80-year-old's musical taste. He is half right — much of what I love comes from my paternal grandma; the rest is from my parents.
And yet there is the music of my early teens, the boy bands and ballads, the songs I rolled my eyes at while I turned up the Creedence Clearwater Revival CD in my Discman, but secretly loved.
I'm teaching a personal essay class this semester, and my students are assigned to write about a song. I say I would choose Savage Garden's "Truly, Madly, Deeply." None of them know it.
My son and I go through a drive-thru and eat ice cream in the parking lot. I turn down the radio and tell him about this silly, romantic song I liked when I was a kid. How I've been thinking of how strange it feels that I stayed up late waiting to record it, while he was born into a world where every song is a Google search away.
"It's something I wonder about," I say, "something I don't really know — what it might mean for you to grow up having so much of what you want so easy to find."
I ask him if he wants to hear the song, and he shrugs. It takes me a half-second to pull it up on YouTube. Over those dramatic chords, he starts to giggle. "Savage Garden?" he says. "Their name is Savage Garden?"
He is, of course, 13. When he was a toddler, I wrote about us as a tidally locked planet and moon, facing each other as we spun through space. Anymore, I feel like a small being on that planet's surface, gazing up at a moon I love and do not see enough of to understand.
"Hey," I say, "I loved this song."
We listen and eat ice cream and catch each other's eyes and laugh. Lately he looks so much like me, with his messy hair and freckled nose and wide smile, that when I introduce him as my child, people tend to say, "I can tell."
I tell him Darren Hayes is Australian, like that explains anything. That I looked it up and found out he wrote "Truly, Madly, Deeply" after Savage Garden hit it big and he had to go to the city without his wife. How he was a kid who wanted to be famous, and when he found himself famous, he wanted to go home.
I still feel young, except when I name a song I loved at 13 and receive in response a roomful of blank stares.
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Sometimes I say I love teaching college students because they want so much. On my son's 13th birthday, I told a friend that I love teenagers for their earnestness, their ability to feel everything so immediately and intensely. She told me she'd remind me of that on the days I didn't feel that way at all.
My students are closer in age to my children than to me. I still feel young, except when I name a song I loved at 13 and receive in response a roomful of blank stares. Time moves so fast, I tell them. Two hundred years ago, all anyone had was the music someone performed in front of them. When I was a kid, all I had was my family members' albums and the radio.
H and I finish our ice cream. Before I start the car, I pick up my phone. "So, what do you like lately?" I ask. "I can put on any song you want."
I tell my sons and my students about what it felt like to be 13, and what it feels like to remember being 13, because I don't want them to think I've aged out of desire. If there's anything I've learned in adulthood, it's that longing never stops. I don't fully understand their lives, and they don't understand mine, but we can agree on that. To be human is to want — truly, madly, deeply.
He shrugs and leans against the window. He smiles. "Turn on the radio." ♦
Tara Roberts is a writer and educator who lives in Moscow with her husband, sons and poodle. Her work has appeared in The Belladonna Comedy, Moss, Hippocampus and a variety of regional publications. Follow her on Twitter @tarabethidaho.
