U2

On the way back from taking Joel to the Albany airport the other morning, I was listening to U2's Running to Stand Still.

It's on the Joshua Tree album, which is one of my favoritest albums ever; both because it's great (particularly side 1), and because it reminds me of the summer of 1987.

-Mom and I took the train cross-country to LA that summer. To Malibu, really. I had just gotten my first (and last) Walkman cassette player, and I had one tape. That tape. Joshua Tree. Which our family friends, the Kerns, had copied onto tape for me from the LP I'd just gotten for my birthday. (They copied it because my family didn't have enough newfangled stereo equipment to effect such a transfer.)

That album is perfect for a cross-country train ride, because you can hear that train-y track-y clackity-clackity rhythm through pretty much every song. Yeah, every song. It's a train album. It's a western album. It's a sage brush dry dirt baking sun cactus open sky California album.

I packed minimally for that trip. I had some black Hanes t-shirts and some Fruit of the Loom men's boxer shorts. And one black button-down cotton skirt. My mom and I had purchased that skirt specially the previous winter, so I would have something formal to wear while I was serving rice pilaf to members of my church during some sit-down pledge-drive dinner we set up on folding tables in the sanctuary. By the summer, I had washed it enough times that it was starting to lose its crisp black, and was looking a bit grey around the edges. My plan was to wear the skirt during the day, as we sat and traveled in the train, and then at night (as we continued to sit and travel in the train) I would unbutton it (revealing my perfectly legitimate public-wear boxer shorts) and straighten the skirt out full-length to use as a throw-blanket to cover me as I slept. I thought this was a very clever plan. It meant that I didn't have to lug around an extra blanket, and that I could feel like I was changing into nighttime sleepwear without really having to change into nighttime sleepwear.

I was 16. It was one of the best summers ever.