radio lovesong
When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island. Just me and my baby. Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart. Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details. Like making a living. Or needing a few skills. You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump. Basic stuff like that. I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs: Love will find a way. Or all you really need is love. Or love is the answer. Love love love. Oh baby oh baby oh baby.
Oh brother. I’ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school. Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me. Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.
You can learn life’s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way. Oh baby oh baby oh baby. Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies. But it sure did on my adulthood dreams. Or nightmares, really. Still, I was knock-headed persistent. Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand: Hand to Mouth Survival. Karen, my wife now of three decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.
The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive. I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations, that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.
We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story…with an ending not yet written. I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window – I think we all know it’s really, on some level, still a love story.
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