by Eric Shoars
“Okay, okay,” Laurel inserts putting her hands up in a double stop position. “We actually have business to attend to...namely, the three songs we want to practice today. First song, Take The Day. Everyone has the sheet music on their iPads?”
Todd, Lorelei, and I respond with a simultaneous yes. Todd and I exchange sideway glances to put a finishing touch on our bickering. Looking left, I make eye contact with Lorelei and then narrow my eyes telling her she’s still on thin ice. Lori, in turn, sticks her tongue out at me again.
“I will pull this car over right now!” Todd yells feigning we’re on his last nerve.
“Yes, Dad,” the two of us reply with a heavy lilt.
“Dammit!” Todd barks. “I walked myself into that trap!”
Laurel shakes her head once more but ignores our foolishness. “Everyone have their instruments tuned?” she asks.
Three answers in the affirmative.
“Let’s get our vocal instruments tuned.”
Laurel leads us through some humming and lip trills that seem suspiciously similar to making bubbles in my milk when I was a kid. Then it’s the traditional Do-Re-Mi drill. We finish the warmup to Laurel’s satisfaction.
“Sounds like we’re a go,” Laurel moves us forward. “Ready, Julie?” In the midst of us is our official video biographer pointing a Canon video camera at us. My wife gives Laurel an okay sign with her left hand.
“Let’s do this,” Laurel says. “Take The Day. Eric?”
I jump in, “One, two...one, two, three, four!”
Lorelei converted the sheet music and lyrics my freelancer had written to an iPad-friendly format and digitally shared them to our devices. Each one of us has an iPad on a stand so we can read the song off the device rather than off paper on a traditional music stand. Each of us practiced our parts individually before today’s session so we’re familiar with how our part of the song sounds but this moment is the first moment the four of us have heard all parts together.
Laurel starts with the first line on her own, “How could we forget?” Then the rest of us join her. “Those sweet childhood days. Naivety and carefree fun. In the schoolyard, as we played. We go back to yesterday.”
It’s absolutely the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. The hair on the back of my neck starts doing the mambo and butterflies on steroids zoom about my stomach. We’ve positioned our instruments in a way so we not only hear each other but we see each other. This is not how we’ll appear on stage when we perform but we need to bond with the music and with each other.
Part of me feels like it’s disassociating from my body and is floating above me, observing. My “ghost eyes” see past and present as one. It sees four 50-year-olds and four nine-year-olds singing and playing at the same time.
“Old friends, we can’t let this dream end. God only knows what’s around the bend. Seize the moment, take the day. Sing and laugh and dance and play,” we sing.
Images of a sixth grader being told he couldn’t sing and a seventh grader he wasn’t good enough to play drums flash in my head.
“You know we had this rock dream. That we’d become a band. We’d rock out all night. Our name up there in lights. Microphones in our hands. Moms and Dads didn’t understand,” goes the next part.
Listening to Take The Day being played and sung is freaking magic. If this is how the first song sounds, I cannot wait for the songs that come next. The goal of the songs is to be a biography of our lives but also for our contemporaries who, like us, are in a nostalgic stage of younger, simpler times before marriages, mortgages, kids, and obligations.
It’s a first practice, sure, but we sound like we’ve been playing awhile. Our individual efforts have clearly paid off. Our instruments blend well but what is more gratifying is so do our voices. I shouldn’t be surprised since I knew we sounded terrific together after our karaoke night at A.J.’s on East Court. But that was to songs we were familiar with. How would we sound with new material?
Damn good. That’s how.
Ghost form descends back into my body and I’m fully in the moment when I realize Laurel, Lorelei, and Todd are looking at me with huge smiles. I’m not sure what their ghost selves are showing them but it must be at least as splendid as what I saw.
Laurel’s head bobs as she sings. Todd is grimacing the way all serious rock guitarists do. Lorelei’s fingers flash with fanatical flair as she strikes the keys.
I catch a look at Julie as she records. She has a huge grin on her face. Laurel and I catch sight of Seth walking up next to Julie. He is smiling as well, his fists raised in the air in triumph. Onions At A Crime Scene has a hit on its hands. We let last notes hang in the air giving us the opportunity to enjoy every last moment of the song.
Lorelei lets out a “Wooo!” that reverberates through the garage. Then all six of us erupt in applause.
“That was out of sight!” Julie exclaims looking up from her camera. “I can’t believe this is the first time you’ve played together. You sound terrific.”
Seth claps. “Great sound. Nailed it right out of the box. Tour ready now.”
“Oh stop,” Laurel brushes off her husband’s exaggeration. “But we do sound legit.”
“Legit?” Lorelei repeats. “We sound like a band. A real band.”
I hold back comment waiting for Todd’s assessment before adding my two cents. “Safe to say I was the least excited by all this. Had a lot of doubts. A lot.” He shakes his head. “Gotta say this isn’t the bad idea I thought it was.”
Five sets of eyes come my way. My smile is damn near ear to ear. “Song two, anyone?”
Nods abound. “Moving to song two,” Laurel says. “Happy Ever After”.
Digital devices are set to display song two. Different butterflies populate my gastric region. Happy Ever After is the song inspired by Lorelei’s loss of her husband. Lorelei’s read the lyrics and has practiced the song on her own so the tune isn’t a surprise but it’s tough not to be nervous for her and how this song feels as we perform it as a group.
When you enter life as an adult now constrained by employers and bills you take for granted how much time you have. At 30 you’re no longer a young adult but a full-fledged responsible adult. But there is time. There’s so much time to live and to make plans and to achieve and to accomplish. Time to raise kids. Time to be empty nesters. Then there’s the time that is taken away from you. The loss. The loss of freedom that comes with jobs and kids. The loss of friendships due to growing apart or moving apart. The loss of parents or spouses through death.
The next thing you know you’re 50 years old and time is no longer your friend. More time behind you than ahead of you and that time seems hollow when you must spend the rest of yours without the person who was supposed to be with you till death do you part but was taken from you three decades too soon.
As much as we have joyful and hopeful songs filled with feel-good nostalgia, we also need songs of loss, of transition, of looking back. We are not exclusive in our sense of loss, our acceptance that — though our best days aren’t necessarily behind us - they are numbered.
The days ahead of us will find us wiser but also slowing down and with a slow decline in our physical capabilities. I’ve often asked myself how old I am, if I didn’t know how old I was. Many times I’ve answered “35” because I honestly feel as strong as I did then. Gray hairs coming in at my temples with more frequency tell me to re-do my age math.
Our playing of the song is solid but a bit tentative, musically walking on eggshells in our empathy and regard for Lorelei. We’re playing and singing the song but three of us aren’t fully engaged with the song because of our vocally tip-toeing around the subject matter. Granted, we’re playing well; our individual practice is showing. But, Lorelei notwithstanding, Laurel, Todd, and I have some things to let go of if this song is going to have the emotional impact we want it to have on
our audiences.
Once more the final notes fade on a song. Everyone is holding our collective breath as we wait for Lorelei’s reaction. This is the first time we’re all hearing this song but so too for Lorelei. A small “whew” rather than a big “woo” comes slowly from Lorelei. She dabs a small trail of tears from her right cheek. No one says a word. No one breathes. Lori picks up on the silence.
“What?” sounds almost like a challenge as it comes out. “Oh, come on, I’m not a fragile little flower,” Lorelei asserts. “The big blow was losing my husband not this song. I think the song is lovely and so damned real it makes me cry for others who know this loss but I’m okay. OH-KAY,” she emphasizes.
The rest of us exhale. Our lips form a smile knowing that we’ve come through one emotional minefield just fine. One more rogue tear makes a break for it down Lorelei’s cheek. We look away for a moment out of respect.
“Can I make a comment?” Julie asks. We three nod yes. “You guys sound good but it just seemed like you were holding back. Everything was technically correct but it didn’t have the impact it should have. I don’t want to offend you but that’s how I heard it.”
“That’s because we were holding back, weren’t we?” Todd confirms.
“Yeah, we were,” Laurel agrees.
“Well, stop it,” Lorelei says. “This is just one of a library of our songs that packs a punch and we’d better be able to deliver the punch. And take the punch.”
“I agree with this,” I chime in, “but it is our first time through and we played and sang well. Hitting the musical notes to me is the most important the first time through. Hitting the emotional notes will come with more practice and recognizing to dive in and not be tentative.” Placing my right hand over my heart I finish with, “And that’s coming from someone who was holding back for the same reason we all were.”
“Do you have any gut-wrenching, rip-your-heart-out-experience songs about your life?” Todd drops in my lap.
“Yeah, the song is called ‘Waiting A Lifetime To Put My Dream Band Together After Being Told How Worthless I Am’. How’s that?” An eyebrow raise is my final punctuation that lets Todd and the others know I’m teasing but also reminding them I am not without a lingering soul wound.
Todd grunts and nods in acknowledgment of my response. “Should we do this song again now or after we run through the third song?”
Laurel is the first to answer. “Let’s move ahead to No Way Back Today. My turn for the gut wrencher.” I shoot Laurel a look of apology that she shakes off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that to come out like a shot at you or the song. Just a little nervous at hearing something based on my life for the first time. I’m fine with the song but, well, we’ll see how it goes. Then we can go back and run through the songs again making adjustments where we need to. Yes?”
“Yeah, I like that idea,” Lorelei says. “Shall we?”
Laurel nods and I start the count. And we’re off.
No Way Back Today is an apt song for our generation, for any generation actually. In the literal version of the song it’s about a mom who will be an empty nester whose final child will be off to college and, for the first time since giving birth to the first child, will have a house with only two spouses living in it. But it’s about more than that. It’s about a loss of identity. An identity crisis born of what you do rather than who you are.
We all do it. Our identities – our self-worth – become intertwined with what happens outside of us. Men, for example, typically define our worth by our jobs, our careers. Two decades ago a mentor had seen me on such a course and brought it to my attention. He cautioned me to emotionally step back from my career. Not because it was a bad career but because he could see that I was defining myself based upon how well my career was going.
He told me, “If you are what you do then when you don’t, you aren’t. That’s why men have such difficulty when they lose a job whether being laid off, fired, or retired. If you’re not a policeman, a firefighter, a teacher, a salesman...then what are you? A serious identity crisis results from the loss of self and, in many cases, profound depression. It’s okay to identify with your career but don’t let your career become your identity.”
Those words had hit me where I live. Upon reflection it was clear my mentor knew exactly what he was talking about. My career was definitely my identity even more than being a husband and a father, because my career was also wrapped in with my role and identity as provider for Julie and the girls.
I heard my mentor’s voice in the back of my head when Laurel shared with me her struggle at the coming reality of being a mom with no kids in the house. It’s what inspired the song but my hope is that Laurel and others take the song to heart and it will help process the loss in a healthy way that is freeing.
Our performance of No Way Back Today is much stronger than Happy Ever After. Having that processing moment between the two emotionally-heavy songs helped us purge some of our tentativeness. We still have five songs to get through in our next practice but this first practice has exceeded my expectations. Maybe it’s our age, our experience, or our comfort with this endeavor but this session has been free of the clumsiness I had expected of people who had never played together before.
We are far from flawless and there are some things we need to work through and we haven’t even started on how we engage with the audience as we perform but this is a solid effort.
Final notes of the song hang in the air before disappearing completely. Seth walks up to his wife and puts his arms around her. “I’m fine,” Laurel says. “I just think of an empty house and how quiet it’s going to be and it gets to me. It’s okay.” Seth gives Laurel a hug and then goes back to his observation position by the garage door.
“Laurel, trust me,” Lorelei offers, “it’s not going to be as bad as you think it may be. There’s going to be an adjustment, definitely. There will be days when you cry for no reason. You may miss yelling at them for not putting dishes away or picking their dirty socks off the floor or forgetting to take out the trash for the hundredth time. But, you’ll see your boys more often than you expect. Isn’t that the case, Eric?”
“Absolutely,” I pop in. “Julie and I found we were happily surprised how much more time we had for each other and opportunity to recommit to each other in ways we hadn’t had the chance to in years because the girls had to be the priority. We were always putting ourselves and our marriage behind Nicole and Ashley. Plus, now I get to chase Julie around the kitchen table naked and not worry about anyone walking in on us.” I shoot a smile at Julie.
My wife covers her face with her palms mostly from embarrassment but also from my inappropriate comment. Seth, on the other hand, claps in anticipation. “I can’t wait to be an empty nester!”
Laurel rolls her eyes at her husband and me over the typical male behavior not to mention the one-track mind. “How are you ever going to chase me around the table when I’m on tour?”
“Oh!” Todd exclaims at Laurel’s quick comeback.
“Snap!” Lorelei adds.
More laughter. This is a genuine joy with these three childhood friends I share so many experiences with and now get the chance to come alongside on this quest. I’m not sure how all of this ends but I do know I’m enjoying the hell out of the beginning.
***
A couple hours later we call it a wrap on our maiden voyage practice agreeing to keep it to four hours. It’s important we keep this a fun experience and not descend into serious tediousness. Practice now behind us, it’s time to gather and socialize. Laurel and Seth are gracious hosts for our first post-practice supper.
The six of us are on the deck seated in a semi-circle, the grill ready to accept burgers and brats we’ve all brought. Seth is filling the role of grill master expertly. The deck runs the entire back of the house with a patio door allowing easy access to the kitchen. Laurel has seated herself afte
r bringing the last of the condiments out and placing them on the table.
Each of us is enjoying our beverage of choice while we pass time till our food is ready. Laurel and Lorelei both have a glass of pinot grigio, Julie has a bottle of Leiny’s Summer Shandy, Todd has a bottle of Bud, and I’m working on a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
We’re in a jubilant mood after running through the songs and making some adjustments. Perhaps it was because we had the bar of expectations set low or maybe we are genuinely surprised at how we exceeded our expectations. Whatever the case, our reunion tour is legit. We still have five songs to master but we have time to worry about those later. For now, it’s enjoying being together. It is a beautiful evening to do so.
May in Iowa is a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes it can be the best of Spring and sometimes it can be the hottest of Summer. This May evening is the best of both worlds...the warmth of a summer evening with the low humidity of a Spring night. Laurel and Seth’s place is at the rounded end of the cul-de-sac with woods and a small stream running behind it. The trees are large enough that they shield us from being beaten by the sun without hindering our view of a magnificently blue sky. As we chill on the deck a soft breeze excuses itself as it brushes by us. It is glorious.
“This is the best,” Lorelei announces closing her eyes and lifting her face to the sky.
“Yeah,” Laurel agrees, “Seth and I spend a lot of time out here. We eat as many meals as we can on the deck. It’s our backyard escape.”
“Get any deer back here?” Todd asks.
“Quite a few,” Seth answers. “They’ve gotten used to us so they come closer than they used to. It’s great.”
“I don’t think I’d ever move from this spot the whole summer,” Julie says, looking at me. I nod knowing she is correct.
“Summers as a kid were so wicked,” Lorelei continues her thought path. “Anywhere I could hike, swim, or bike I would go and wouldn’t come back till sundown.”