When I was three my parents got divorced and when I was five my Mom and I moved to Lincoln and my Dad remained in Beatrice. On the weekends I would go and visit my Dad and my parents would have to cart me from town to town. On Sundays, I always came home around 8 o’clock, but that was also around my bedtime. My parents would play James Taylor’s greatest hits to make me go to sleep on the way home. Once you leave Beatrice’s city limits there is a big curve on the road, then I know we are on our way. The road is fairly smooth, but like every road in Nebraska has a few pot holes. In the hour that it takes to get from town to town you come across many things. There is a train track on the side that has a bridge where many young rebels vandalize with spray paint and there are acres and acres of grass and farms. In the summers when the corn is knee high I would stare down the rows and watch as my eyes gazed from one row to another as the car moved. There are two towns in between Lincoln and Beatrice on the highway, both have gas stations and grain elevators, and that’s basically it. After the towns the landscape changes quickly back to the blankness of the Nebraska prairie. There isn’t much to look at on the ground, but in the summers around 8 o’clock it is possibly the best time to watch the sunset. The sky appears in varying shades of red, orange, blue, and purple. It seemed like we were chasing it on the smooth pavement. James Taylor's images changed showing different times of his life, just like the different times of my life that I took that trip. For many years I spent my Sunday nights listening to his music while staring down the country road. Although I changed and evolved physically over the years my emotions about the song remained the same and so did the country road I traveled on. Through all the changes in my life the road always remained the same.
"Pencil Thin Mustache" Jimmy Buffet
My Uncle Lloyd had a pencil thin mustache, much like Jimmy Buffet. He had patchy red facial hair and in the 80’s I guess that was the thing to do. He was always hysterical and I loved him very much, especially when he spoke like Donald Duck. I always thought that he looked strange with his mustache, so did Grandma, but he loved it so it stayed. I remember not letting him give me any kisses because the mustache felt so prickly. It was a light red color, a strawberry blonde. He kept it neat and trimmed, but sometimes there were some leftovers in there. On occasion the ends got long and it was always a question of great concern if he were to turn the ends up. I imagine that his wife didn’t appreciate his mustache; it would be like kissing a porky pine everyday. There were times when my Father tried to grow a mustache but was extremely unsuccessful. He hardly has any facial hair and that is the way I prefer things, rather than my Uncle and his crazy red mustache.
"Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" Billy Joel
For Christmas one year my mom bought herself a monstrous grand piano. Billy Joel always plays a grand piano in concerts, and he is my mother's idol. She admires how he plays the piano with such a great talent, and I admire that from her. Our grand piano is black and glossy and shines in our great room. The keys are bright white in contrast to the black piano and the black keys of sharps and flats. The top of the piano is always strategically tilted so you are able to see the golden strings and screws attached to each key. There are red and white felt in between the keys so they don’t rub. Despite the uncomfortable bench my mom could sit there for hours and play songs. I always watch in amazement as her short chubby fingers run across the keys. You can hear the ticks of her long fingernails hitting the keys. If there is a sharp or flat to be played she always makes an awkward movement of her shoulder. I would always beg her to play “Scenes from and Italian Restaurant.” The piano solo in the piece can only be played if you have great intensity. It was interesting at first to watch her stocky fingers fumble over the keys, but finally she mastered the song. I will meet her anytime she wants in our great room to watch her play that song.
"Peaches" Presidents of the United States
In elementary school my older cousin Cory bought his first C.D., Presidents of the United States. He was in the 4th grade and I was in 2nd. It was around August and we listened to it for the longest time. On Thanksgiving our family always goes to Mahoney State Park. Cory and I would always go on adventures in the woods. The heavily wooded area in the video reminds me of the great trees at Mahoney State park. We would spend hours in the woods running around the paths. They were not really marked and we were both easily distracted. The trees were enormous and towered over my small body. I couldn’t even wrap my arms around the trunks they were so large. When you looked up it was hard to see the blue sky through all the leaves, except for the trees whose leaves were falling off. The paths were lined with these tall trees where I hid behind and scared my other cousins. On the Friday after Thanksgiving I would never want to leave, I could spend the rest of fall at Mahoney State Park.
"Zombies" The Cranberries
When I was little I had this horrible recurring dream. I too had a zombie that haunted my dreams and showed the same scared face as the children do in this video. "In your head, in your head, zombies zombies zombies," was exactly how I felt when I was thinking about it during the middle of the day and especially a night before I was going to bed. I sat in my bed in fear of falling asleep because I didn't want to see her that night. In this dream there was a small woman with a black bun on top of her head. She looked to be dead because her skin was gray and she looked shriveled and disgusting. She stood in front of a wooden shack that I assumed to be her home and was turning a massive spoon in an even larger cauldron. Her eyes light up when she saw me wandering around the forest late at night. She immediately grabbed an axe and started chasing me. She began to yell about how she needed to cut off my arms and use them in her stew. I tried to convince her each night that it wasn’t my arms that she needed but she would never listen to my pleas. The nightmare would stop right before a cliff, I never knew the end. She was my zombie and she haunted my dreams.
"I Wish You Were Here" Incubus
Every summer I spend every weekend at my lake house in Clarks, Nebraska with my family. I have loved the water ever since I was a little girl. Every Friday when we get there I take off my shoes and run down to the shore. I think when the band says, "I dig my toes into the sand and in this moment I am happy" is something that I can totally relate to. When I jump into the water and my head goes under I feel as though I am weightless. The water surrounds me and if I weren’t going to run out of breath sometimes I think I would never come up. The water gets increasingly colder as you go down, but is only deep in a few spots. The rest of the lake is surprisingly shallow. The water is murky but relatively clean, it is sometimes interrupted by patches of seaweed. In the mornings the water looks like glass, it is so smooth and untouched. In the afternoons it looks choppy with boats and skiers creating large waves that wash over the beaches. The sand at the bottom feels like it has a layer of grime before you get to the regular sand and it is much coarser than the fine sand at the beach. I love to wiggle my toes in the fine sand where the beach meets the water. I am able to look out over the lake and it is in that moment that I am happy.
When I was around 8 my dad started to try and introduce me into playing golf. I was not really too enthused because my older brother, Ryan, would always make fun of me when I whiffed the ball. In the video Jessica is attempting to play golf and she swings and misses, I totally feel her pain. Now that I am a much better golf player I begin to realize the calming sensation of a fluid swing and striking the ball perfectly so it floats through the air and lands in the middle of the fairway. The white shinny ball is small, about the size of a large bouncy ball. It has dozens of little dimples covering the entire ball. Golf balls usually have writing on it from a particular brand. My golf balls have a “K” on them delicately placed with help of my green sharpie. When I place the ball carefully on the wooden tee and line up for my drives I look at it intensely as if to say, “Please go far and straight” although I know it cannot hear me. When I do hit the ball I look into the distance to see whether it will hook or slice, fade or pull, and sometimes if it will go high in the air at all. When the ball is in the sky it is so hard to follow the small white dot, and it is so hard to spot on the fairway or worse in the thick weeds that trim the outside of the fairway. Once you get up to the ball it is so easy to see with the contrast of the dark green grass and the crisp white ball. While golfing I have learned a lot of lessons about life, and about being patient. It is not something that comes to you all at once, or a sport that is easy to master. Golf is frustrating because even though you want things to be a certain way, they don’t always. The fun is making the impossible shots happen, or having the perfect drive, or making a long distance put.
I went to Lincoln East High School and I was a cheerleader for three years. Sometimes being a cheerleader has a negative connotation but at my school we were just average, partially because of our coach. She was very serious and treated it just like any other sport. When I was a sophomore I got my first pair of pom poms at school, they are not as big as the ones in “Mickey” but they mean the same thing to every cheerleader. When they came in the mail they were huge! They were oval shaped and about 10 inches long. They had a small white plastic stick in the middle that was just big enough for you to grab and on the ends there were these small pieces of metallic blue and silver streamers. I can still remember the first time I had to squeeze my hand in there, making sure that I wasn’t grabbing any of the streamers to keep them looking nice. Once you got them on properly there was one thing that we always did, it was like a natural instinct, we rubbed our poms together. I remember the first night football game when they shimmered with the big lights overhead. When there was a touchdown and we would scream and clap and everyone threw their hands in the air and it looked like blue and silver confetti over us. The basketball games when the blue and silver colors became tainted while the yellow lights of the gymnasium shone on them. When we made a tunnel for all the players and our pom poms made the archway for their special walk to the court or field. The pom poms were significant because they establish your purpose at the game, to encourage the players and gratify them when they are loosing, to pick them up when they are feeling down. They sparkle and catch the eyes of everyone watching.
