American Family Outing {Part I}: Sunny Saturday Child-Days/Excursions and Rainstorms/Is This Still Done?

Regards, Jean Shepard.

[Part I of a 4 part mini-series.]

1. Sun-Filled Rooms/the Sacred Purchasing of a Hi-Fi System

I first rocked and swayed to the poignant words of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” - appended to the end of this mini-memoir - on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the living room of our old house on Evergreen Ave., in Wilton, Connecticut, in these United States of America, environs of Planet Earth, etc. while my Mom was vacuuming and had the radio cranked up, on the new Hi-Fi system we all went to pick out together a few months before on a Family Excursion.

That must have been the summer of 1978. The day was filled with rooms: one after the other, pleasantly clogged with light-beams, dust floating in lazy constellations, sounds & kid-shouts. I don’t know if I ever felt that at ease, that at home, again in my life. When was the last time you felt really at ease? — Later, after the Creature Feature or Tales from the Unexpected on TV, it would be going-outside time, to find some friends hanging out in the neighborhood; and all the curious delights & semi-dangers & mischief of light and dark Nature afforded.

But first were chores done to the sound of those big infinity speakers, man - nothing like them, and I still got 'em. They went with me from Connecticut to NYC and back and to college and thence to Boston…and back home to Wilton, very same neighborhood. Who knows their next adventurous destination? One of those precious sets of objects, if you are a unrepentant Sentimentalist like me, that I just like to keep near, in proximity — as if it were an instant portal; a non-functioning, hypothetical time machine, link to the moments and instances of the Past. Fueled only by imagination and longing and remembrance; no scientific principles at work… Well, it does still play LPs — and in Edison’s time that was no small feat, pretty magical on its own. Nothing to sneeze at, at least.

During this particular aforementioned Family Excursion, a category occupying pretty officially designated time periods, distinct events, including Ice Cream Night or Movie Theater Night, I remember the salesman at the stereo store explaining the gravity, commitment, and caring required of an American Family who had made the essential and ineluctable decision to purchase and own a mid-level consumer high-fidelity system. This was not something for Mom & Dad & Junior & Sis to take lightly. Even if sis was two years old, it really was incumbent on the little lass that she absorb the meaning and sensation as soon as possible - perhaps via her first Simon and Garfunkel record. I mean, our family might as well have been getting their first spaceship, given all the electronic principles elucidated in hushed tones. Or maybe preparing to adopt a child. At least a puppy. A classy puppy.

A gen-u-wyne, state-of-the-art hi-fidelity system required maintenance, care, love, reverence - all that was aptly conveyed. It asked for prayers and devotions, and in turn, like the harvest & leaves & flowers come springtime, would dispense Bob Seger & Stevie Wonder & Donna Summer & The Knack and other delights - sprinkled like hot petals upon the upward-turned faces of supplicants, delivered straight through this stereo, this magical device, by the God of Rock and Roll (and Jazz and Classical and Folk, etc.).

The salesman who was our guide that night - well, I discerned him to be a true believer; not just a pitchman. Kids can tell what grown-ups are full of shit and which are kind and sincere. Grown-ups have grown past realizing that. So I listened intently to him and my father discuss a fair deal going down: grown-ups discussing matters of terrific import. Listening to one parry; the other; like a very polite tennis match. I believe even specifications were exchanged at one point. Which my father, a painter, must have nodded at graciously and knowingly, without understanding a word. Even in the Age of the Sensitive Male, when trading specs, men were expected to just understand somehow.

But once we got home, and all connections were made, everything lit up like a Christmas tree of a different kind, I was just grateful for the warmth and texture of the sound that emanated from the corner of the living room, out of the tuner with its gorgeous glowing strip of blue and yellow, perched on a wood cabinet (one done in a faux-Mexican style, another artifice we still have to this day: on its front is a piece of art depicting what looked to me - and still does - like two horned deer clashing, in either rivalry or friendship. I still haven’t decided convincingly one way or another after 50 years. They are my version, I suppose, of the fair maidens being chased forever in Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”)

And then… :

That sound emanating! From Sgt. Peppers, or Bookends, or Mozart, or Chic, the soundtrack to Grease, or some freaky cutting edge jazz fusion composer from Lithuania my father selected at the library; it all seemed to mix naturally with sundogs & kid-visions, and the effortless, musical feeling of life then; everything suffused with some vast unexplainable emotional potency, that seems to be the rule when one is only 7 years removed from the Great Voidness (or as another Romantic poet put it: “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”) .

In any case. from that particular afternoon moment on, “Running on Empty” fit so snugly into 1 p.m on Saturday, with clear-skies; it sounded like Forever embarking on the highway. And I was hooked for at least that long.

Part II coming soon.