By Michael Nettleton
Into The
Great Wide Open
Tom Petty,
Jeff Lynne
Eddie waited ‘til he finished high school.
He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo
He met a girl out there with a tattoo too
The future was wide open.
My wife asked me an interesting question the other day.
“When you were a kid, did you ever visualize where life would take you?
The things you would do, the places you would live, where you’d end up?”
Keep in mind, when I was a tubby little saxophone player wanna-be living
with my folks in tiny timber town Bandon-by-the-Sea, deep thinking wasn’t
exactly my strong suit. To be fair to my younger self, sleeping, eating, and
being an all-around pain-in-the ass didn’t leave much time for self-reflection.
I mean, I knew I didn’t want to end up like my folks. First of all, they
were really, really, old. My dad, at the time was fifty-something. And Mom was
in her forties. I was never, never, never, going to be that old. And I’d never
wear a Lions Club sweater with a caption that read The Sons of the Beaches like Pop. Talk about unhip. I also had a
feeling that I’d leave that one horse town and go somewhere really urban,
really sophisticated, really hip and groovy. Like Coos Bay. Or maybe, in the
wildest stretches of my imagination, Tillamook.
They moved into a place they both could
afford
He found a night club, he could work at the
door
She had a guitar and she taught him some
chords
The sky was the limit
Well, I’m seventy-one now, kinda creaky and crabby and I’ve been lucky
enough to have had my share of adventures. Stumbling into a career that turned
me into a radio gypsy, I’ve lived in a number of medium sized and big cities, traveled
to some fairly exotic locales and with the help of my wife and co-conspirator
Carolyn, written half a dozen books, a stage play and a couple of screenplays.
(Anybody wanna make a movie? I’ll make you a deal on a script).
Carolyn decided to go to college in Arizona for one primal reason. She
was cold and wanted to live somewhere warm. Tucson and the New York Catskills
are on opposite ends of the meteorological spectrum. I, on the other hand,
started city-hopping based on a voice on the other end of the phone saying
“We’ve got a slot open for you. We’ll pay you $50 more a week than you’re
making.” I had U-haul on retainer. I didn’t so much live places as hover there.
Facebook is an interesting, frightening, and sometimes repulsive
phenomenon. Because of its addictive nature, I’ve reconnected with people from
places all up and down my personal timeline. Sometimes communicating with them
can evoke a warm smile and trigger expansive memories. At other times I find myself
wondering how the two of us ever tolerated each other. As lifestyle, political,
and religious ideas get indelibly imprinted on us, we find that our differences
sometimes outweigh our common history and one-time fondness for each other.
Recently I heard from a very old friend from high school and college
days. He’s retired, living in Florida and seemed happy to reconnect with me. At
one point we were very tight, almost brothers. It’s been fifty years since we
last saw one another. I fear for what may come: The irreconcilable differences we
may discover, the disdain we may harbor for each other’s opinions. Of course,
that may just be the creaky, crabby, pessimistic me emerging from my
self-imposed social cocoon. Maybe, it will just be two old friends
rediscovering one another. Maybe some of the same things will make us smile and
laugh as we used to. But I have a niggling fear, impossible to ignore, that the
past is never enough to overcome the realities of the present.
Nostalgia’s not what it used to be.
Into the great wide open,
Under them skies so blue.
Out in the great wide open.
A rebel without a clue.
