Carole, Joni and Me

When I was my daughter's age -- just turning 18, just graduated from high school -- I spent most of the summer miserably in the general vicinity of home.  Ripped from my second set of boarding school friends  -- the people with whom I had lived with far more intimately than I had my own family since I had turned twelve -- and unable to work on Cape Cod as I had the previous two sumnmers, I was lonely and sad and spent most of my free time listening to Carole King's Tapestry album and Joni Mitchell's Blue album. 

I moved in with my maternal grandmother so that I could take a scintillating job as a chambermaid in a suburban motel chain, and occasionally spent the week-end with her and her incredibly irritating second husband in his Kentucky cabin, where I drove his tiny motorboat up and down the small lake and sang to myself:  

"So far away, doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?"

 

 

 

 

 

and  

"I wish I had a river so w-i-i-i-i-de, I could sail away on." 

 

In mid-July, I moved home; my stepmother had died in a sudden accident and, although I would never have voluntarily spent more than a few consecutive days in the house when she was there, I was willing to go back and try to be of some support to my father, widowed for the second time in ten years.  I found a ride to Cincinnati, then a 45-minute commute each way, and kept slogging it out as a maid.  (Tip for summer motel maids:  you do the bathrooms and vacuuming  during the commericals so you can watch soap operas while you're changing the beds and dusting.)  

Relief finally came my way toward the end of the summer, when my father handed me a plane ticket west and told me that my birthday present would be two weeks with a boarding school classmate, first at her family's cabin in Colorado and then at their home in Scottsdale.  

I was thinking about my daughter and that week in Colorado as I made a long drive this afternoon.  My friend and I rode horseback further up into the mountains every day, and hung out with a group of kids our age in a cabin every night, listening to Firesign Theatre albums.  I'm sure we spent a lot of time stretched out alongside mountain lakes agonizing over The Future, but I don't remember much of those conversations.  We were used to living far from home and weren't particularly perturbed about going off to college.   

 (Found a picture -- the internet is amazing!) 

What I DO remember is that we met some guys from a road crew who had MOTORCYCLES.  And late, late at night, we would sling our legs across the seat backs, throw our arms around those young men, whoever they were, and ride with our long, long hair streaming behind us as they raced as fast as they could along the narrow mountain roads.

I would not want to hear about my lovely daughter riding helmetless at top speed on the back of a motorcycle with her arms tightly grasping a young man she had met hours before.

But when we looked up into the Colorado skies, there were a zillion stars above us.