Soundtrack of My Life #3

"Baby the Rain Must Fall" performed by Glenn Yarbough

For starters, there is nothing that gets my pulse pounding quicker than stepping out the door of a little puddle-jumper commuter plane, hitting that wall of intense humidity and the smell of av gas and then walking across the tarmac to a tiny airport knowing you've never been here before and likely will never be here again. And, you have no clue what lies beyond the exit door.

Just sitting here at the coffeeshop typing, I can't help grinning. And here's the song that started it all.

The summer between my 8th Grade graduation and heading off to boarding
school, I took my first solo trip. I was 14. Actually, I'm actually very foggy about the actual chronology, but I think it started with a family trip to the Napa Valley to visit my mom's sister's family, the Galushas. My cousin Daryl, a couple of years older than me and, living in the burgeoning Napa Valley wine country, had leased a couple acres of grapes and he needed some help tending to them. This grist for another story, so I'll move on.

After doing all I could to help Daryl for a week or two, I got on a Greyhound for the trip to Eureka, CA (by myself) where my Grandpa Cookson picked me up in his wonderful Lincoln Continental and took me out to the family ranch (about 30 miles east of Eureka which I introduced in the first song in the list). The plan was for me to help my Uncle Ron Burden, several of my cousins and other interested parties, prep the ranch for upcoming groups who were using the camping facilities there. (Again, this is grist for another story.)

To the point, I first heard this song on my Uncle Ron's portable stereo turntable. And I was hooked. I was alone on a significant trip without any immediate family in attendance and it felt amazing! This song became part of my worldview in ways I wouldn't completely understand for years.

Several more puzzle pieces here. My dad worked as a sanitarian for the local county health department. It was a great job and kept us well fed but to my very young eyes, it looked very boring. He went to work at the same time everyday and got home at the same time every night. 

It was years later, when he took a job with the first air pollution control district in the state of Washington, that I first saw him innovating and truly having fun at work. However in my adolescent eyes, he still did basically the same thing, in the same place every day. But by that time, I knew I couldn't possibly follow in my dad's footsteps. I needed to see the world!

Jump ahead six years, I'm walking down the jetway in the San Francisco Airport for my China Airlines flight to Indonesia, via Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore (much more on this later) and I felt…free! I was truly, for the first time in my life, on my own. It felt spectacular!

Jump ahead a decade or so, and I begin to see some significant cracks in this philosophy. It turns out, you can't do just anything anytime "because it feels right." And if you try, you end up having to ignore, for at least periods of time, people who care for you, love you and have expectations of your love and attention in return. Yes, I grin whenever I hear this song and always will. But life has tempered the depth of my belief in the philosophy it espouses.

Wherever my heart leads me
Baby I must go, baby I must go.

In the life of a mature adult, usually, but not always, your brain needs to get involved.

Sometimes, growing up sucks!

If you missed the first two Soundtrack of My Life posts, you can find the here.