music, books, love and kindness

Sometimes I feel like I can exactly pinpoint the last time my sister and I really got along and were even maybe good friends who would have had a connection even had we not been related. It was 1985 and my sister was a Madonna fanatic...even going to school, like a million other girls across America at the time, dressed like the singer during her "Desperately Seeking Susan" days. I liked Madonna, too, but my like was very lukewarm compared to my sister's and other than that we had little in common with our music interests. We hadn't since we played David Naughton's 1979 "Makin' It" so much on our turntable we wore the single out.

One day, though, my sister came trough the door, having just returned home from shopping with her friends at the mall and she pulled out a cassette from a Sam Goody bag. She really liked the single "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On" and like me she would often buy an entire album just based on having heard one or two songs at the most. Back then you really had no choice unless the 45 single just happened to be backed with the other song you liked.

I didn't pay much attention to what she was playing until I heard this amazing and frenetic thumping coming from her room. Enticed, I went in and asked her what the song was and she told me it was Robert Palmer. And all I could think of was how different this song sounded from "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On" and how much better and less scary and dark it was too. The song title sounded like an insult (who wants to be called 'hyperactive' after all?) but actually proved itself to be a really poppy love song/anthem the more my sister played it.

There are days I think about how much we both liked that album and how I sometimes actually mourn the loss of the relationship we once had, the way we only really had each sometimes when our parents were not getting along or our mother was mad at both of us or it was too cold or rainy outside to play with the neighborhood kids. I hate nostalgia, I really, really hate it...not because I don't see the appeal of wanting to go back to better times, better days (I do), but because I don't see the point. There are no time machines, after all, and regression is hardly healthy, mentally or physically. Still, some things are easier said than done and you can't deny those times the heart misses what it misses...