Silly Love Songs: The Soundtrack of a Sappy Boy

Stay with me while we grow old/
And we will live each day in springtime/
Cause lovin' you has made my life so beautiful/
And every day my life is filled with lovin' you.

-- Lovin You, Minnie Riperton and Richard Rudolph

The Grammy Awards have come and gone, and it kept the attention of my two boys (ages 5 and 7) surprisingly well. I guess it makes sense -- people making music and wearing outlandish costumes is kind of like every Disney musical they've ever seen. Some were more cartoonish than others, obviously.

I was most struck by the enthusiasm with which Jackson, the five year old, responded when The Bieber (as we call him around Chez Fuchs) appeared on screen. Again, not much mystery there; he's a child who wows adults with his rhythmic and dancing skills. And you can't turn on any of the channels my kids enjoy watching without seeing The Bieber promoting his new film, "Never Say Never." I've got highly educated friends of mine professing their love for the kid on their Facebook pages. It's kind of scary.

So as I'm witnessing my kids' idolization of Grammy hopefuls like The Bieber, I am prompted to take a look back in time to when I was at my sappiest. The year was 1976, and I was 12 going on 13, squarely in the most uncomfortable time in a boy's life -- the "pre-teen" years. The pop songs that dominated the spring of that year went right to my heart, pulling at its mythical strings. "I Like Dreaming," "My Eyes Adored You," and "Silly Love Songs" are three hits that sent me into flights of romantic imaginings. When I heard these songs I needed to find a quiet, private space where I could just sit and listen and place myself in the story I thought the song was trying to tell. One of those places was in the stand of pine trees that marked the property line between the Karneses and the Hills. I liked to climb to the top of these pines, some thirty to forty feet up. From that high I had a great view of the Francises' back yard, and I would often see Debbie, a dimple-cheeked girl with a dazzling, snaggle-toothed smile and sandy brown hair, running and playing with her three collies who barked non-stop, all day and night. The song was perfect in my mind: “Carried your books from school, playing make believe you’re married to me. /You were fifth grade; I was sixth, when we came to meet.”

Of course as anyone and everyone knows, 1976 also marked the pinnacle of the ascendancy of disco music, and although I certainly recall trying to make sense of "Disco Duck" and "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty," Rick Dees and K.C. did not feature prominently in the soundtrack of my childhood. Disco was the music that made its way through the rafters of the ice skating rink at Rye Playland, where my friends tried to rip the labels off the back of the girls’ Levi’s as they giggled past, fully aware of their part in the game. When you actually got the tag, which was rare indeed, the idea was to walk the girl in question outside to the boardwalk. Then you’d push your way through a cut-out bit of chain link fence and make your way down to the beach. Once there, you were expected to chat a bit. And then you made out.

I'd like to tell you I know this from my own experience at the time, but then I'd be getting into the realm of fiction. In reality, I may have gone skating once or twice at Playland, but I was self-conscious, awkward, and decidedly unsuccessful in the seeking and acquisition of Levi's tags. In a word, I was a sap. I made up elaborate stories in my head of defending Debbie's honor and rescuing her from those who would do her harm. These were usually personified by boys in our class who I identified as bullies. In my fantasies I beat them senseless, utilizing Kung Fu skills that made Bruce Lee's look amateurish. In tears, she would thank me, and we would kiss.

It wasn't until a couple of years later, not long after my braces were removed, that I finally had my first kiss. It was an abject failure. The girl was someone I didn't even know all that well; we were at a drive-in movie together with a group of friends, and I guess she just felt it was the thing to do. Her breath smelled like cigarette smoke and buttery popcorn, and she watched the movie with one eye as we kissed. That would have been in the summer of 1979, when I was sixteen years old. Late, I know, for a first kiss. 1979 was, appropriately, the year of Meatloaf's "You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth." The lyric continues, "It must have been while you were kissing me."

Thankfully, my first "real girlfriend" saved me later that summer, when she kissed me the way every 16 year old boy wants to be kissed. When I'm asked about my First Kiss, I usually delete the drive-in one, and move right to this one. It happened on a perfect, temperate night, and we were playing ping pong in an odd little outbuilding that her family had constructed for the kids years ago. It had electricity, and I remember this, because at an opportune moment, I turned off the light, pulled her to me in the darkness and had the kiss that made me understand what the big deal was. Thinking of it now, my breathing changes, and my vision clouds a little. (Or maybe I'm just getting to the age where I need my asthma pump and reading glasses.)

Keeping to the theme, our make-out album was Carole King's Tapestry, which came out in 1971. I liked that it was retro and not tied to the inane stuff that we were hearing on the radio that year. (Ah, who am I kidding? I loved "What A Fool Believes" by the Doobie Brothers and "Crazy Love" by Poco.)

There's one song that I listen to today that still brings me back to that perfect moment. (And it is a perfect moment. It's one of those moments I'll be muttering about as an old man, when my grandchildren come to visit me at the Home.) It's a stanza from Greg Brown's 1990 song, "If I Had Known."

A hayride on an Autumn night
Well we was 15 if I remember right
We were far apart at the start of the ride
but somehow we ended up side by side
We hit a bump and she grabbed my arm
The night was as cold as her lips were warm
I shivered as her hand held mine
And then I kissed her one more time

And Jane if I had known--
I might have stopped kissing right then
It's just as well we don't know
when things will never be that good again


Now, there are people out there -- some of whom are likely to be reading this -- who need to be assured that they're not to take Greg's words literally. Of course, there have been experiences that have eclipsed the one I described above since that time.

But the memory of that moment is pristine. It was as if my sappy boyhood fantasies all suddenly came to life. Not surprisingly, those fantasies tailed off after that, as I found that living in the real world wasn't so bad after all.

Oh and by the way, if I managed to get any of the songs I've referenced stuck in your head, I apologize.

Bicycles and Me

I want to ride my bicycle;

I want to ride my bike.

I want to ride my bicycle;

I want to ride it where I like.

-- Freddie Mercury

In the beginning, there was the red Schwinn. Or at least that's how I remember it. There were, in fact, many bikes in our neighborhood. We had a bicycle culture when I was a boy in the 1970's. I haven't thought about it in years, but as I recall the accessories I bought for that bike -- the baskets and rear view mirrors, the generator lights that ran on pedal power, and the horns -- it makes me realize just how important my bikes were to me back then.

I suppose each bike was a kind of status symbol that said something about the kid who rode it. I don't pretend to have a memory that could call up all the different brand names each kid had, but I do remember one distinctly -- the Raleigh Chopper that Richie Mahoney owned. If I'm not mistaken it was a rust brown color and it was the coolest bike by far.

That is until Richie trashed it. That's what we did with our bikes back then. We were heavily influenced by the ABC hit TV series Happy Days, and there was a very popular storyline about the Fonz falling for Pinky Tuscadero, leader of the Pink Ladies. She was just as tough as Fonzie, and the two of them rode motorcycles together. To me, they were nothing short of the perfect couple, so I was devastated when Pinky was injured during a demolition derby by the evil Malachi Brothers. My friends and I regularly re-enacted the derby on the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, much to the chagrin of our parents, I would imagine, who must have wondered how we managed to smash up our bikes so completely on such a regular basis.

I would also imagine that I was the Fonz and Lorraine Mahoney was Pinky, and that we were the king and the queen of the demolition derby. No matter how things turned out in the cul de sac, in my mind, we always won, and lived happily ever after.

(I was a bit of a Walter Mitty, even back then.)

Bikes became less a part of my life as I got older; although that changed when we moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan when I was going into the tenth grade, in the summer of 1978. One of the first things I noticed about Grosse Pointe Park, the town where we lived, was how flat it was. My brother and I were given bikes as a means of transportation; he rode to the middle school each day, and I rode over to Grosse Pointe South High School. It was an easy, bucolic, painfully suburban ride.

The first time I ever got intoxicated was in Grosse Pointe, at Wendy Maniere's house, about a block away from where I lived. At the end of the party, I rode my ten speed home, which was no easy feat. As I recall, there were no cars on the road, but I still managed to get tripped up at a stop sign and land on my ass.

I walked my bike the rest of the way home, collapsed into my bed and vomited shortly thereafter, in a manner so violent that I found myself promising the toilet bowl I would never drink again. (I lied.)

Bicycles didn't really play a part in my life again until I went to college and met Susan Barney. We bought ten speeds together and would take them for rides over to Oakwood Cemetery, where we would sit against trees and read. This was one of those simple, quiet pleasures of those years that I'll remember always.

When the two of us traveled one summer in Europe, we rented bikes in France, in Aix-en-Provence, I believe it was. The travel had wearied me, so that riding the French bicycle was difficult, and I ended up not only exhausted, but sick, as well. I remembered a cure for nausea I had found while traveling in California, when I got car-sick driving up Big Sur. I had my girlfriend's older sister pull the rental car over, and I sat on the side of the road, ready to be sick. Then I noticed a familiar smell -- eucalyptus. I was sitting right beside a bush of the stuff. As I sniffed in the aroma, I immediately felt better. There wasn't any eucalyptus in France, so I sat under a tree and breathed in the smells of the grass and earth until I felt better. (Susan was good enough to take a picture, capturing me in this condition.)

Bicycles were absent from my life during my time living in Manhattan, as that was an era of mind-numbing blurriness, for the most part. It wasn't until I re-emerged on the other side of the East River, in Brooklyn, that I decided to invest in another bike. I lived next to Prospect Park, a biking mecca, and I was wheeling into a new life, yet again.

Now, here in Manor, Texas, I ride my bike as often as I can. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those guys you see going up hills on the side of the highway, wearing brightly colored spandex, and I didn't need to take out a second mortgage to buy my bicycle. I like to ride a mile or two at a time, or just go for a spin with my kids every now and then. It's not much, but there's a feeling of freedom and renewal I get when I'm on my bike. And I'm not saying the red Schwinn will be my "Rosebud" or anything as heavy as that, but I do feel a connection to all those earlier, cycling selves each time I get on the bike and ride.