Every once in awhile, you need to get out of your comfort zone, and when that time comes, a good place to start is Eastern Colorado. I was out there last week; I flew into Denver, while my luggage went to Jackson Hole, and then I took a shuttle van up to Greeley, where my best friend Linda’s daughter was enrolling as a freshman at the University of Northern Colorado. She seemed to me a strange creature, long-legged, shy but serene-eyed, with the kind of long hair a romance writer would describe as “chestnut tresses,” when so recently she was a toddler splashing in the bathtub boisterously misquoting Pearl Jam, “Hearts and darts they fade, fade away …”

I tried to quell these thoughts, since Linda was all but drowning in them, and it was my job as aunt to try to distract mother and daughter from the grief of this milestone separation with whimsical pranks like filling the school-supply shopping cart at Target with notebooks depicting pink kittens and Zac Efron. Target, yes. And Sears and J.C. Penney and lunch at The Olive Garden.

“I’m in America now,” I reminded myself, as I walked across the parking lot of Wal-Mart, passing a car with a “Nobama” bumper sticker and then strolling by the weaponry section of that fine store on my way to procure a pair of flip-flops. (I had to buy the bare necessities to sustain myself – panties and pajamas, skin care products and a second pair of shoes since my suitcase was still MIA, not that I’m pointing any fingers, Frontier Airlines.) “Y’all still sell guns at Wal-Mart?” I heard a man ask and nearly pivoted to scold him. “Dude! You’re, like, only 50 miles from Columbine!” But I refrained. One thing I hear with disturbing frequency when I venture into America is, “This isn’t New York.” I hope I don’t conduct myself with the provincialism of the Upper West Sider who thinks fresh fruit and vegetables come from Zabar’s but I must confess I am put off by the long, long drives which apparently are not, when they are challenged, long at all. A thirty minute drive to go to dinner is nothing, and this was confirmed the next day when, with no small amount of sorrow and snuffling, Linda and I headed to her home in Ogden, Utah.

This required driving across the width of southern Wyoming, which took an entire day and can best be summarized in haiku:

Sage, trailers, red rock
Great music with my best friend
Antelope do play

In Ogden, I reacquainted myself with Linda’s twin sons, who in my memory were last seen in a double stroller (I exaggerate) and are now happy, freckled thirteen-year-olds on skateboards. Thirteen was the age Linda and I were when we met; eighteen, like her daughter, when we went our separate ways to college (she to Arizona, and I to New York), so that makes five years of concentrated adolescent anguish, record-playing in the basement, picture-drawing, story-telling and synchronized sulking, on which we have built a lifetime of friendship.

But during that time we developed a rich and idiosyncratic patois, which, when as adults we intermittently reunite, causes outsiders to smile politely and back away slowly. Linda’s children have long since learned to tilt their heads at us, turn to one another, and engage in their own secret dialect, bemused but not confounded by the fact their mother and her friend have launched not into the customary exclusive language of adults (insurance, betrayals, medical procedures) but into a lexicon of silliness we ought to have long ago outgrown. Linda’s husband, an outdoorsman of infinite patience, sits by as long as he can stand it, nodding with recognition at the odd phrase in the startrek/starwars/beatles/Dylan/stones/springsteen/yourmom/
mydad/thatteacher dialect --the way a Parisian might cotton to the general meaning of a Cajun -- eventually gives up and politely remembers a neglected project in the garage, on the roof, or on the other side of town.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a fortune of musical knowledge, must be in pursuit of a soul mate. In the buddy-movie, bromance Hollywood culture, women who are longtime friends are either sisters or college roommates (i.e., in either case, no choice was made) and what ties them together is first the pursuit of beauty and a man, and later the burden of aging, caretaking and abandonment. But, that ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. Girls do, in fact, just want to have fun. We like stuff, too. Reading, writing, music. Running, downhill skiing, skating, orienteering. This kind of indulgence – the pursuit of personal interests -- might be the ultimate pornography, since it is never presented on television or in the movies. On the screen, women don’t bond over activities that merely engage them but do not nurture others. They are together only when cooking, sewing, or keeping a home.

Last Sunday, I was the guest co-host on Linda’s radio show “Sunday Sagebrush” on radio station KRCL, the voice of the Wasatch Front. In addition to being a volunteer dj on this Sunday show, Linda is the music feature writer for the local paper, the Standard-Examiner (http://www.standard.net), and has recently begun producing a weekly podcast called “The Beat Beat.” She yearns to dictate the musical taste of the whole of the free-thinking West, and when I joined her as a guest dj, we chortled in the realization of our lifelong dream (“I hate this song, I hate this song!”) to RULE THE AIRWAVES.

With “Americana, Roots and Blues” as the program’s designated category, we played Dave Alvin (she always opens with Dave Alvin), Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Raul Malo, Loretta Lynn, the Be Good Tanyas, Sam Baker, Clydesdale, Cory Chisel, Cracker, Neko Case, and Steve Earle, Steve Earle, Steve Earle. (You can find the whole playlist here: the whole playlist). We chatted about the song or artist’s significance, told stories of our girlhood and peered at shelves of CDs the way we had pored over what album to play next when we were 13, 14, 15 and on.

“You girls sound like you’re having fun,” one caller told Linda, as he requested Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory.”

“You two were hilarious. A pair of 13 year olds!” offered Linda’s friend Dan Weldon, a marvelous locally-based musician (http://danweldon.com/) when he came to Linda’s house later that day to eat barbecued carne asada. “You sounded like Gidget goes on the radio.”

Our jaws dropped in simultaneous indignation. “Gidget! We did not! We spoke intelligently about the music!”

“We expressed opinions,” I pointed out to Dan, who I love. “We critiqued.”

“Well,” he said. “Maybe nasty Gidgets.”

To be continued …

Labels: KRCL, Linda East Brady, Steve Earle

posted by Elizabeth at 6:44 AM