The BetsyG-Spot

By BetsyG

Last weekend, as a result of all the jabbering I’ve been doing on Facebook, I made plans to meet up with a couple of old friends for dinner and drinks in our hometown, Desire.

Lately, I’ve been immersed in all things Desire. This weekend in particular I spent hours editing old Super8 footage—from my birthday parties, from my neighborhood, from a parade along the town’s main drag circa 1973.

I don’t get back to Desire very often. When I do, I almost always go straight to my parents’ house, which is about a half-mile off the highway. The house is so close to the highway, in fact, that growing up I was lulled to sleep by the not-so-distant low of high-speed traffic. One time a friend from work came by the house to help load a mattress into my minivan, and when a truck blew its horn on the interstate, she said, “Can you always hear that?”

“Hear what?” I said.

I rarely drive into town, though I like to see Desire’s Christmas lights. When I was married and we still celebrated Hanukah at my parents’ house, my husband would never take me to see the blue tree in the town center; after dinner he just wanted to zip onto the highway and get home. This weekend, though, my friends and I were meeting at a restaurant right across from the tree, so there would be no missing it.

Driving to Desire from my current home, I was listening to The Playground on WERS out of Emerson College, a radio show that features kids’ songs. The program caught my attention first with a song about a Moose in Moosachusetts, kept it with Poor Unfortunate Souls from Little Mermaid, and had me hooked with a bluesy rendition of Cruella DeVil from 101 Dalmatians. (Here’s the playlist from that particular show.)

When I pulled off the highway onto the exit for Desire, the song Puff the Magic Dragon came on, which is both a great listening song and a great singing song. Soon I was driving down the main drag—the parade route on the old footage—heading toward my beloved blue tree, singing Puff.

Here’s a little-known bit of BetsyG trivia: very often, music makes me cry. I described in my post In The Heights: Full Confession how I could barely contain myself during the opening number of a Broadway show. While I can’t always predict when watching people sing and dance will do this to me, I am guaranteed to cry when I sing along with certain songs. To Sir With Love is one of them. Chain Gang, by the Pretenders did that to me until I wore it out singing it with my band. When this phenomenon occurs, I choke up so badly I can’t get any words out; then I usually give myself a whack across the face and berate myself for this mutant behavior.

As you might have guessed, Puff the Magic Dragon is another ditty that has this effect on me. What is sadder than the tale of poor Puff losing his best friend (“a dragon lasts forever, but not so little boys”)? Just typing the lyric, my eyes are filling with tears. So imagine me driving through Desire, with all the memories that have come to the surface in the past few weeks churning so actively, with all the old friends, neighbors, and acquaintances I’m connecting with and sharing pictures with so vivid in my mind, singing a song that makes me break down every time it passes through my vocal chords.

As I drove through the section of town that was featured in the parade footage, Puff was sadly slipping back into his cave. And I was beyond choked up; I was weeping.

I can’t fully explain it, but I think I felt a great sense of loss and longing at that moment, for the past, for my childhood, for innocence, for the children I knew who are gone already. Or maybe the song’s key and lyrics are so damned manipulative, it simply strips me of my ability to modulate emotion.

Whatever it is, I decided not to beat myself up over it over it this time. I let the tears flow until Peter, Paul, and Mary were done torturing me, and then I pulled into the parking lot behind what used to be my bank, wiped away the tears, and found my friend at the bar.

The typographer and copyeditor in me is sickened by my posting this particular version, with its spotty capitalization of proper nouns and dubious spelling of what I always imagined was spelled Honalee, but it is the better video (i.e., less annoying graphics, though it’s a close call) of the two on Youtube that include the lyrics.