As you can tell, I was just born to be famous. I had the haircut of the moment (hello Dorthy Hamill) and a fur-rimmed jacket that even J.Lo would envy. And check out the hand in one pocket, so pimp!

This picture was taken at the Shore Acres Botanical Gardens in Coos Bay, Oregon. I used to think this place was magical, especially around Christmas when they would place festive lights all around the gardens. I haven’t been back to Coos Bay since my sister Gina and I had to transition my aunt and uncle into a nursing home facility back in 2006. My uncle was pushing 100 and my aunt had a debilitating stroke. They never had any kids so it was all left to the nieces and nephews to deal with the situation.

I’ll never forget how hard it was to pack the contents of their house. We had to throw away so much junk -30 years worth of it. If they had something in the house, they had two broken ones in the basement. And we would find really odd things like the ziploc bags full of hundreds of small ramen noodle seasoning packets stored in the kitchen cupboards. My aunt only used a half a packet and saved the extras for later. You know, just in case.

The two of them had few things of value. Just the antique Korean lacquer furniture and some pieces of gaudy jewelry. What they had was important to them. My uncle had a lazyboy recliner that was so well loved that if someone else sat in it, it wouldn’t feel right. He slept, read and ate in that thing and took it to the nursing home with him. My aunt on the other hand had about 20 different plastic combs to fluff up her frizzy grey hair and when my sister threw them all out, save for one – let’s just say it wasn’t a pretty day.

The deconstruction of someone’s life into two boxes and some personal effects is a sobering. It makes you realize that you should really divert your energy into having big experiences, not lots of things. Because in the end you can’t take it with you and you don’t want to be lamenting the loss of a blue comb.

When I was 14, I was listening to Ministry and Skinny Puppy and I can tell you that I was into all sorts of no good back then. Innocent were the days when  Jermain Stewart (you don’t have to take your clothes off to have a good time!) and The Jets (I have a crush on you!) were blaring from my record player.  Of course, at that point I was still playing with plastic horses and was reading “Sweet Valley High” books.

And yes, I did mean record player.

As I recall, my life took a dramatic turn at a certain point and the soundtrack to my life switched to Depeche Mode, Violent Femmes, The Yaz and so on.  What I call my “gateway” musical period.  Everyone else was listening to Motley Crue and Van Halen and if you didn’t listen to that, you were an outcast.  Male or female, straight or gay … you were a “faggot”.  But I pretty much didn’t care.

Other snippets of music infused memory include:

Cindy Lauper: “True Colors” - First slow dance with Sean the Mormon (7th Grade).
Belinda Carlisle: “Circle In The Sand” – First slow dance with Chad the sk8ter (8th Grade).
Depeche Mode: “But Not Tonight” – Sneaking out of the house for the first time with Paula (9th).
The Cure: “Close To Me” – Listening to this song when I got in my first car accident (incidentally with Paula) where we flew a Toyota 4 Runner off of a cliff.
Simon & Garfunkel Catalog: Summer of love 1990 … “Eugene Green!”
Charlatan’s UK: “The Only One I Know” – Played every morning for 99,000 days straight by my first live-in boyfriend and he ruined the song for me.

(I could go on and on – going back to the year MJ’s Thriller hit the billboard charts.)

So when the music that blares out of your kid’s room goes from say, Flo-Rida to Bob Marley, as a parent you start to think:  Why is her soundtrack different?  What’s changed?  Then your mind starts to wander into dangerous “paranoid parent” mode.  CALL ME IRRATIONAL, but when I think of Bob Marley this image conjures up in my head:

You know I’m right.  You see it too.

So like any parent, I am just praying that Paige is just a Bob Marley lover because she is a lover of music. But even if it means something different, I can handle it.  She and I can make it through just about anything okay, unless I start hearing this from her bedroom:

Then I just really won’t know what to do.