Tuesday Afternoon

Soundtrack for a summer

My brother sent me a text that said Denny Laine of the Moody Blues died yesterday afternoon. Think on that… 

It was a Wednesday that he sent me the text, so Denny died on Tuesday afternoon.+ I’ve had the song playing in my head for days. Of all the songs of our childhood among musical people who loved all kinds of music and singing and passed that love onto me and my siblings, “Tuesday Afternoon”* stands out. If you’re not familiar (probably many are not), “The Afternoon” is part of the album Days of Future Passed, an rock album that features a symphonic theme, with a full orchestra backing, and the songs follow the course of a day, from “Dawn” to “Nights in White Satin”. 

My grandmother loved this album, and she played it a million times during the summer 1971, when my siblings and I spent the summer with her in Sedalia, Colorado. I hear any song from it and I’m a tween in hand-me-down clothes curled up with a litter of husky puppies or gardening with my grandmother at twilight, the only garden she ever had, in the rented farmhouse that rattled when the trains passed across the street. I used to think the sound could kill me, and closed my eyes tight waiting for it to pass by, my hands over the heart I feared would explode. 

“Tuesday Afternoon” held a sense of possibility, a sense of horizons…out there, somewhere. “Something calls to me….”  Something was calling me, my young and dreaming heart wanting things I didn’t know how to name. It still feels that way, hearing it now…something calling me to know more, see more, expand my horizons. In those days, I had no idea what that would look like, how a person just…broke out.

My grandfather had an Exxon station off 1-25 in Castle Rock, eight miles away. He wasn’t home often, and when he was, he tended to stay in his shop, a vast garage full of engine parts and vending machines he tinkered with. He was a genius with engines, and an inventor. My brother hung out with him out there, but I don’t remember ever stepping in for more than a few minutes to get the quarters or nickels that came out of the machines at the station. We kids rolled coins into paper wrappers, our hands grimy by the end. We were paid for our labors and took the money into the three- block downtown of Castle Rock, then a tiny county seat on the highway. We played miniature golf and swam for endless hours. I spent my money on art supplies from the Rexall Drug Store—pastels and pads of paper and pencils and pens. My grandmother hung my works of genius on her walls, exclaiming at my talent.  

”Live all you people…” the song said. It was written in the late sixties, an exhortation to throw off the ordinary trappings of life and really live. Live now. Live deeply.

My uncle was an older teen, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and troubled. He didn’t live with my grandmother, but in a house in town with a bunch of friends in a house that later burned down during party. The friends were making over a bus they were going to drive to California (that golden place that called us all). I had a painful crush on one of his friends. I imagined how it would be to load up the bus and travel around the country. It was impossibly romantic. 

Also, it turns out, impossible. They never finished. After the fire, they all drifted away. (This bus has a cameo in The Starfish Sisters.)

I read The Diary of Anne Frank that summer, sobbing in shock over her death, the first time I realized that things didn’t always end happily. I named my diary in her honor. I often sat on the balcony of my grandmother’s room drawing the fields and road that stretched to the mountains. Sometimes I walked alone on those lonely roads, watching storm clouds move closer, feeling the enormity of nature around me, vast and empty. (Then. It’s all houses now.) 

That summer takes up far more space in the timeline of my history than it should, a few short months while my parents worked and settled us into a newly built house in the suburbs of Colorado Springs. So much of it endured to make me who I am that it does have an outsize importance—I love to garden because of the hours I spent with my grandmother in that little half acre of vegetables; my journaling habit took root; I read Edgar Cayce and new thought books from my grandmother’s shelves and came to understand that God and spirituality could take many forms. It was the first time I said to anyone, “I don’t believe in hell.” Why would a God of Love condemn people to eternal damnation? My aunt and uncle were practicing Siddha Yoga, bringing a flavor of Eastern beliefs into our world and I read far above my age, gulping down anything there was to feed my curious longing to know the world.

That summer, I was as much myself as it was possible to be. I read and cooked and drew and walk. Several of my novels have roots in that year, in grandmotherhood and gardens and crushes on impossible people, and that yearning for something else that carts a girl from tween to adult to middle age, that yearning that turns her into a writer, an artist, a traveler.

That’s how the song “Tuesday Afternoon” feels to me. Like that long ago summer, loving the world and books and my grandmother and kittens and Anne the husky and the mountains under a big sky filling with storm clouds and the promise of a big life, out there, somewhere. 

Day of Future Passed is a great album. This beautiful analysis might nudge you along if you’ve never listened.  https://progarchy.com/2018/05/28/the-pillars-of-prog-part-2-nights-in-white-satin/

Then, let’s make a cup of tea and sit down to listen together, shall we? 

Do you have a season like this one was for me? A song that takes you back to a seminal time? Share in the comments. Let’s get to know each other.

+Turns out Denny left the Moody Blues before the album was made, but…oh, well. 

*Technically, it’s The Afternoon, but in our minds it’s always Tuesday Afternoon.