Of Time and the Guitar God

I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Eddie Van Halen.  He didn't seem that much older than I am, and he wasn't.  I'm 55, and he was 65.

I confess that I felt a bit of shock and sadness primarily because he seems young to me.  It's not like the other death of yesterday, Johnny Nash, who wrote "I Can See Clearly Now," dead at 80.

I had some Van Halen albums, but I didn't listen to them often, and I don't still have them.  I have fond memories of the song "Jump."  In college, a group of us went to a rollerskating rink in Newberry, South Carolina.  At that point, my boyfriend who would become my husband wasn't my boyfriend yet, and I was awed at his ability to jump while wearing clunky skates.

The young are easily impressed.

I was not one of those people who could argue which rock god played the greatest guitar.  As an English major, I could argue about lyrics for hours.

I thought about that aspect of myself last night.  Instead of watching T.V., we had satellite radio on and tuned to one of those stations that plays the music of our middle and high school years, late 70's and early 80's classic rock.  I went to bed, read for a bit, and then turned out the light.  "Come Sail Away" by Styx was on.  I thought about a sleepover I had with my best friend in middle school, how we listened to the radio in the dark and talked about what the last part of the song meant.  We talked about what we would do if aliens appeared and invited us to come sail away.

It took me awhile to drift off to sleep, and I lay there thinking about how familiar it felt to be cozy in bed, listening to music chosen by someone else.  Was I back in my dorm room?  I thought about how familiar it seems to be listening to someone else's radio station.  Was I back in my childhood house, listening to the radio that my mom listened to?  

For a strange moment, I felt like I was a disembodied consciousness, that I could sense the artificiality of time as a linear construct.