I have often said that one of the great things about music is that listening to a song can bring you back to a specific place and time in your life to the point that you can even hear certain sounds and even remember specific scents of that time. I had one of those moments this morning with a song I won't name... OK, it was "How Am I Supposed To Live Without You" by Michael Bolton... and it made me think of something.
When I wore a younger man's clothes (Billy Joel reference... nailed it), my luck with the ladies was not something you could consider stellar. I seemed to be the King of the Friend Zone even before the Friend Zone had a name. I even had a group of friends in that same boat and we called ourselves The Stepping Stones because we tended to be the nice guys girls dated in between the jerks. It seemed to be our lot in life. (Don't think this is a pity party here; we are all married and some of us have provided a new generation to our shenanigans.) When we were fortunate to be able to call someone our girlfriend (much less have them refer to us as their boyfriend), life seemed a bit brighter. The sun was warmer, food tasted better, air was cleaner to breathe, and we would waste more notebook paper on notes than we would on the classwork we were supposed to be paying attention to.
And then, there was the summertime. There were quite a few times where I would go on vacations or to summer camp and somehow meet up with a young lady that would make my heart go pitter-patter. I seriously was trying to figure out how to move to certain sections of the country so that I could meet girls based on where they were from. It was like I had a War Room in my mind with maps of the United States everywhere, color coded based on my luck meeting girls from the different states. Sad? Maybe a little. But I DO have an overactive imagination that I am not afraid to admit to.
But what happens when that budding love affair in those adolescent years ends? Oh dear. Hide the sharp objects and bring on the emotional rollercoaster that can only be equated to the effect they used on "Star Trek" whenever the Enterprise was fired upon: back and forth and back and forth and a lot of shaking. We didn't want to talk and we felt that we were the only person in the world that understood what we were going through. All the while, there were the adults in our lives telling us that we would see how silly we were when we got older.
Now that we ARE those adults, we do tend to use phrases like "Kiddo, you have not BEGUN to understand this," or "Everyone has to go through this at least once to grow," or even "Suck it up, buttercup: it's all downhill from here." I get the fact that we have been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it, but why do we tend to discount these things to the generations that follow us? It is true that we get frustrated that our kids don't want to listen to the advice of "the old people," but we all did the same thing. Add to that the fact that each generations problems seem to get more complex (two words: THE INTERNET), and some of these kids don't know whether they are coming or going sometimes. Heck, the same could be said of some of the adults that I know.
But here is where the complication comes in for me. As I was listening to the Michael Bolton pseudo-power ballad lamenting for lost love and how it affected the songwriter's very existence, it made me realize something that young love lost has to deal with that we really don't. Outside of the "summer love" that can truly be a struggle for young people in our age before computers made the entire planet accessible from our living rooms, most of their romantic relationships happen in school. And what happens when they break up? THEY STILL HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL. They still have to see their former flame's friends, and they even have to see the next person they decide to bestow their affections on, and that has to be TORTURE. As adults, it is a lot easier to bury our heads in the sand and avoid the other person. (Unless you are dating within your office, and we all know the old saying about doing things where you eat. That is just a tough deal.) And outside of convincing your parents to put you in private school or one of the two of you moving to a different continent (because that is how we felt at that age... crossing international borders was the only solution), you were in that bubble five days a week for half of the year. And heaven forbid if you had any classes together. The mere proximity that you could not avoid was brutality, and it was somehow worse if it was not them in the class but one of their inner circle. You KNEW that they knew stuff you didn't and that was enough to drive even a sane person to the brink of darkness.
Combine that with the hormone levels that can only be measured by the Hubble Telescope and you have a recipe for disaster. Sure, the generation that dealt with that before us truly wants to help us through these times, but it was one of those things that we just had to fight through to get to the other side of. And all that us old people can do is wait for them to come to us. And then we just tell them that this too will pass and to wake up and start another day tomorrow. Because we were there and we understand on a certain level.
So, when the former Master of the Hair Cape sings about living without someone, remember how WE heard that song and it affected our world. It's still going on with the younger people, and we need to respect that because all they have been living for may truly be gone in that moment.
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