Steady On

When you live in a town that doesn't have a grocery store, an orthodontist, a dentist, a middle school, or... ok, well, anything except a high cow to person ratio, you end up spending a lot of time in the car, add on to that that you are a **Child of Divorce** and you are basically glued to your bucket seat. This means two major addictions are likely to be inflicted upon you -- NPR and particular music selections. One of the lesser known properties of family cars is that they are vectors of inertia*. This means that once a tape is in the car the likelihood that it leaves the car within a decade is close to zero. Heck, sometimes it doesn't even come out of the tape-deck for a good six months.

The other thing about that music that gets left in the car is that it becomes integral to your emotional life. I have a lot of songs that I can attach to a particular moment or person or place, but because these songs never left the playlist they are touchstones to go back to, they are the able to untangle any emotional knot. I was a fairly introspective kid, and at the point where you're spending that much time just sitting and listening to music and thinking... it's inevitable that these songs become so important.

In my family, that music which never managed to escape the vortex was Paul Simon's "Graceland" and Shawn Colvin's "Steady On". They are both really good albums, though clearly you can't really compete with Graceland. Until I was about 12 I thought that Graceland was one piece of music, like a symphony -- then we got it on CD and inadvertently put it on shuffle. It scarred me for life. But I got the CD anyway so that it would make it past the technology change and be safely burned onto computer and loaded onto my ipod. "Steady On" fell by the wayside -- until today. As I was cleaning up TP's room in my attempt to pack after being there for two full weeks, I found a CD copy of "Steady On" and borrowed it, and I'm listening to it right now. Sure, I'm sitting in an airport terminal and typing on a laptop, but I could be driving through rural New England, watching the raindrops on the windows and unravelling the current knot in my heart.

* Yes, vectors of inertia is a technical term. No, I just made it up.