A song came on the radio today. Not just any song but THE song. This song is one of only a handful of songs that have a specific memory attached to it. It takes me back to a place and a time. When it happens I can hear the sounds, see the sights, even smell the same things that I did way back when.
This particular song: Open Arms by Journey. The Time: around 1983.
It was lunch time at the high school where I was going. It was early spring time. I had left campus and walked over to the student union and got into the serpentine line to get a smothered burrito. These things would keep the hunger pains at bay and they were cheap but eating them is probably why I have stomach problems today. I was towards the end of the line and being a bit of a loner I wasn't talking to anyone. As is my wont I turned around and just started watching people. This is a past time of the loner. Also good fodder for the burgeoning writer that I thought I was at the time.
Over at the pool tables the young hustlers were trying to rook the lower classmen. Little gaggles of girls pooled up in various parts of the union talking about whatever it is that young girls talk about. Various young men were floating around the room acting cool. Well thinking they were acting cool anyway. It was full of the noises one would expect from a building full of young people just living life.
Somebody had popped a quarter in the juke box and the opening notes of Open Arms by Journey began to play.
I noticed the line had moved up a few paces so I took my eyes off of the scene for a moment to move up so no one would get ahead of me in line. I only had 1/2 hour for lunch and it took about 20 minutes to work through this line.
When I turned back around to my survey a girl had walked out onto the dance floor. A good looking girl but no beauty queen by anyone's measure. She carried the rather heavily virgin moniker of Mary Martha. No lie that was her name. Mary Martha. Her mother must have wanted a nun.
Mary and I were in Newspaper class together. We were just classmates. I couldn't even call us friends in all honesty but we did know each other. She typed all of the homework that I might have had that needed typing. Back then no one really needed to know how to type. My how times have changed.
Now Mary was out on the dance floor all alone. I remember thinking how sad it was for a nice girl like Mary to be all alone on a dance floor. She wrapped herself in her own arms as if she was afraid someone was going to steal her blanket and she began swaying to the rhythm of the woeful and romantic stylings of Steve Perry and the boys.
As the song wailed on for what seemed an eternity, I really didn't care for this song then, Mary's whole tenor changed, all alone out on the dance floor. That didn't matter to her. She was completely absorbed in her own thoughts. The building could have opened up and swallowed a swarm of flying alligators and she would not have seen it. She was with her man, even though he was nowhere to be found. She swayed more intently and seductively to the music. Her every breath seemed to be dragging her man into the very fiber of her soul. She was in him and he was in her. He enveloped her in his arms and she sighed the comforted sigh of a woman satisfied. Her world was complete. Her love was simple, honest and passionate. With heavy-lidded eyes she looked around the room and didn't see anything but him. She was madly, totally, unrepentantly in love. She couldn't hide it if she tried.
I stood there with gaping mouth and wonderfilled eyes. In all my life, up to that point, I had never seen anything as beautiful, seductive, or erotic as this one girl swaying on the dance floor. There was nothing dirty or obscene about the scene or her swaying. She wasn't dressed like a tramp and she was alone on the dance floor. She may not have been a beauty that caused traffic jams but at that moment and in that place she was the prettiest and sexiest woman in the whole world. She was in love and satisfied being wrapped up in thoughts of her beau.
The world needs some simple, passionate love. Now, as a middle-aged man, I can say and understand that absolutely nothing in this world compares to the beauty of a woman in love.
