Songs evoke memories, sure. Every day I listen to music and
every day a song reminds me of some earlier self. But twice this week, Lucinda
Williams’ great song, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” has come on the radio and
has brought me back not just to a period, but to an eerily precise time and
place.
In August of 1998, I drove my little 4-door Civic from my
beloved home in
Cambridge to Lafayette, Indiana, to take my first
tenure-track job at Purdue. Driving behind me, in his nicer 4-door
darker blue Civic was my boyfriend. As the land got flatter and Boston receded,
I could see his terror mounting. Why, I could feel him thinking, have I
followed this woman away from the East?
I had found a charming apartment: the top floor of a Victorian
house facing a tiny pocket park on the top of a hill. Unfortunately, the prior
tenants refused to leave in time. When I called the landlady to insist on our
rights, she demurred: “He’s from India,” she explained by way of
apology. “I think he’s a rajah!”
Rajah or no, I wanted in to our new apartment, but there was
nothing to do. The moving company left our stuff in the garage and our landlady
put us up in a vacant apartment a few blocks away. This apartment was a tiny
one bedroom in a largely abandoned small apartment building with a distinctly
Sunset Boulevard feel. One vacant apartment in the same building had a ballroom
with French doors leading to a small garden. Although I’d seen it when I was
apartment-hunting and had been momentarily charmed by the faded glamour and the
promise of parties to come, in the end, it was too much to live up to. My
boyfriend and I had never lived together before, and it seemed like a bad omen
to move into a house that reminded me of Miss Havisham.
Nonetheless, there we were, in the very building I had known
to avoid, in a tiny furnished apartment, waiting for the rajah and his
girlfriend to move out.
Guilty, our landlady had stocked the fridge with cold cuts.
I had never seen so many in my life. We had a pound of roast beef, a pound of
turkey, a pound of corned beef, a pound of ham, a pound of swiss, and a pound
and a half of American, a loaf of bread, some mayonnaise, and a jar of yellow
mustard.
No sooner had we arrived, then my boyfriend had to head off
on a sad errand: to the Mayo Clinic to be with his family while his dad
underwent treatment for the cancer that would kill him a year later. He lived
to see us married, but not much more.
Alone with a boombox and pounds and pounds of sliced meat, I
spent my days planning my classes and listening to Lucinda Williams on a bulky
black boombox:
Can't find a
damn thing in this place
Nothing's where
I left it before
Set of keys and
a dusty suitcase
Car wheels on a
gravel road
…
Child in the
backseat about four or five years
Lookin out the
window
Little bit of dirt
mixed with tears
Car wheels on a
gravel road
I wouldn’t want to live through that week again, and I
couldn’t have made it without that song.
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