A little ditty

It seems like lately John Cougar's (pre-Mellencamp) song Jack and Diane keeps popping up in my thoughts and conversations. That song always takes me down a well-worn path of a single memory. I try to hold it at bay, because, by this point, it is tiring. I've been thinking about it for forty years.

It's no big thing, kind of like every time I put on mascara I'll remember a girl named Janie telling me I need to put some on the top of my lashes, and every time I shave my legs I remember a boy named Gary telling me he dreamed that the back of my legs were super hairy, behind the knees. Every single time, for forty years.

One evening, 1982-83, in downtown Sweetwater, my friend Dawn and I were at the pool hall, where the grocery store management company is now, by Dairyland. I wasn't particularly comfortable being there, it wasn't my kind of crowd, but Dawn wanted to talk to somebody who was there. I was talking to Gerilyn Stone out in the parking lot, and I reluctantly lent her my American Fool cassette, which had that seminal song on it. I never got it back.

Around that same time, Gerilyn's mom rented the house next to ours out at Lake Sweetwater, in the Fireman's Point vicinity. There was a big blow-out of a party at Gerilyn's one night. I took a couple of friends to it, parking up from my house, so my folks wouldn't see my car.

I can't believe it, but I drank beer out of a cowboy boot that night. That's how good that party was. 

When the shout went up that we were about to be raided, my buddies and I took off running. We piled into the car and I drove through some bushes trying to get out of there before the cops came. I took my friends back to town, then came back home and had to act like I was as peeved as my folks that there was a party next door and that there were cars parked all in our driveway and yard. It's pretty funny that my parents were the ones who called the sheriff. 

Gerilyn died a few years ago. I can't say that we were part of each other's lives. The last time I saw her was at Willie's Farm Aid in 1986, out by Austin. She was riding in the back of a pick-up with a bunch of other people. She was waving and laughing, much like she always was in my recollection of her. That's a pretty good way to remember somebody. That gal was always up to something.

My favorite part of the song is this:

Let it rock, let it roll,
Let the bible bounce,
Come and save my soul,
Hold on to sixteen,
As long as you can,
Changes come around real soon,
Make us women and men.

And how.

P. S. I like bible bounce instead of bible belt. My interpretation.