I guess you could say this year I've gotten reacquainted with an old friend, well maybe not an old friend cause I've never met him, an old influence more or less, maybe. A certain type of music? What type I don't know really cause it's changed from what it once was. A certain type of band would be the more accurate description possibly? But still I feel most of all like it's just as I said from the start, an old friend.
Let me backtrack a little. My mom died last July and this has been the first time I've been able to utter those words, write them down really and look at those words and know that they are true. She's gone now. And while some days it's harder to deal with than other days, she'll always be close to my heart. She knew I loved her and I think about her everyday. Odd, isn't it how life keeps moving and shaping our lives even when we don't want the changes to occur?
Anyways, not that I wanted to get into that here. But it did bring up the fact that as I helped my siblings clean out her house (the house we were raised in), go through our long forgotten possessions of yester years we were suppose to go get at some point, old high school papers, toys, photos, I discovered something I had stored away in a old dusty box far back in a closet.
Certainly I discovered many things really, a few I couldn't quite throw away. And trust me, we had to throw away a lot of things. My mom never did any serious spring cleaning so we had a 3000 square foot house to organize for the estate sale. You just can't keep everything, even though Mom certainly tried! "It'll be here when you want it," she'd say. And now I'm glad she stocked all of our things up in closet upon closet for us. I couldn't take everything with me that my sister tried to load in my car but I did take a lot of things I'm glad now I have. I can look at those things a year later and smile, thinking of Mom.
Well to the point, as I'm digressing a good bit. I discovered two scrapbooks I had made when I was 15, just getting into what we children from the 80s remember as the Hair Bands. I found posters, some door-size, and photos of my old room completely surrounded by posters of my first favorite heavy metal band. I recall going to the grocery store with Mom when I was an adolescent, always searching the magazine stands for the faces of my current obsession and I probably had a few. But I never had a scrap book of these actors or musicians until one band came along.
It's kinda weird how we associate things with this or that from times passed. I can probably trace a song to every major teenage memory I have. Music has always been a central point of my life, from the time I heard Mom practicing her piano music for church. (She was a church organist for ever since I can remember, the last church being 20 years she played for them.)
So as I was standing there that Saturday in August this past year, at Mom's house, going through a few boxes I had been given to investigate, I opened up one of these scrapbooks. "Oh my god, is that who I think it is?" my sister asked as she pushed more boxes over to my side of the room.
"Yep, that's him." I replied. And a smile came to my face that day, the first in several weeks since Mom had died. A cover of the Rolling Stones magazine from 1985 was glued into the scrapbook. On the cover was Jon Bon Jovi, clad in a black leather jacket, showing his left shoulder with that Superman tattoo. Oh my!
Now I know from seeing a recent Larry King Live show that Jon didn't want to do a sexy cover. He had said on the show that all his practicing guitar had led him to doing that cover and he knew then something was just wrong with all this but he went along with the photo shoot at the time.
"You were really into them," my sister offered.
Oh, wasn't I?! I thought. I had picked up that magazine actually when Mom was in the hospital for a routine surgery when I was 15. I had read the Bon Jovi article a hundred times while I waited in the hospital room. And I had dreamed many a little daydream about meeting Jon or Richie Sambora, the lead guitarist for the band. Like millions of girls, I had a huge crush on Jon most of all.
to be continued...
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