Looking For A New Love.
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When I was really young my parents lived in an apartment a few blocks from my grandparents. My dad’s side of the family was really small and this was the kind of neighborhood that no one seemed to leave behind. My friends down the block and living in the alley behind our house all had their grandparents right around the corner too. We moved to a different part of town the summer before third grade but those first few years made a lasting impression on me.
Our apartment was small, but it was always alive with art, books, and music. Saturdays were for music shows like American Bandstand and Soul Train and Wednesday afternoon always meant a trip to the library. I can actually remember coming home from a library trip and my mom filling the bathroom sink and dragging a chair over to it so that I could let my Fisher Price Little People swim while she watched her favorite soap, “Another World”.
We had an old couple that lived above us and I would spend Sunday nights watching Hee Haw with them while eating M&M’s as my parents escaped for a bit of “big people time”. Our yard was huge with a garden lining the left side and rose bushes climbing up against the back of our garage. The alley behind us was where all of the grade school action happened. On good days it was our meeting place and on the not-so-good days, it wasn’t uncommon for a boy against the girls' style rock fight to break out. I can still remember my dad taking off his headphones and getting up out of his chair to slowly follow me out the door during one particularly bad rock fight. He was lean and tall, usually, the cool parent but our crew (myself included) knew that if my dad was strolling towards us someone was going to regret it.
We played hard and the fights were brutal but most of all I remember the lemonade stands, the MDA carnival we created, and all of those nights in the alley with dad hanging on to the back of my hot pink bike. I wasn’t allowed to have training wheels and that first time I looked back and realized he was about forty feet behind me clapping as I balanced myself was monumental.
It’s really no wonder that I would gravitate back to this neighborhood once a week almost all the way through high school. By that time my grandfather had passed and it was just grandma and her antisocial cat named Pepper but the neighborhood itself hadn’t changed a bit. All of the grandparents still lived on the same block, as they had since the 1940s and many of my friends were still there too. It didn’t just feel like home, instead, it was more like a functional commune of extended family and that was something I really needed to have.
When I was in my mid-teens my dad would wake up on Saturday mornings he would head to grandma’s and I always went with him. I packed an overnight bag and was out the door. He would hang for a while but once he left grandma came to life. It was the mid-80s and her entire block was literally obsessed with wrestling. Jim McMahon, Captain Lou Albano, and The Undertaker were just a few of the names that she and her friends gabbed about non-stop. It was funny because her street would be alive with people but for the two hours on Saturday afternoon, that wrestling aired you could hear a tumbleweed float across the desolate street. As soon as the final match ended they all gathered on the front sidewalk to talk about what they just saw.
My dad thought that grandma’s television choices were funny because this 70-year-old woman swung from soaps to wrestling with a literal turn of the television dial, but it was her other vice that cracked us up. There was a day years earlier when my dad had returned home from a visit and he came in the door laughing before sharing the news, “Well I walked in and grandma was watching Soul Train...”. I already knew what Soul Train was but the thought of granny getting down to a line dance was hilarious.
Get down, she did. Watching grandma watch Soul Train was just as funny to me as that original notion of her doing it was. She would sit on the edge of her recliner in her housecoat with her swollen ankles just mesmerized and her commentary would have me in tears. “That one, she needs to put more clothes on ain’t no one wants to look at all of the jiggles but at least her hair isn’t too long and stringy. It’s big and it sparkles and I like it!” This love of music in some form or another clearly does run through my father’s side of the family tree!
Grandma and I spent many mornings watching Soul Train together and Jody Watley was one of her favorites. Jody started as a dancer on the show and later became one-third of the hit group Shalamar before breaking away to forge a solo career. When she returned to the Soul Train stage to perform “Looking for a New Love”, it was everything. Her hair was grandma approved plus she had huge hoop earrings and a tutu that I instantly fell in love with. She was perfect for so many reasons and so was that particular morning because my birthday was right around the corner. I was on the edge of turning sixteen and finding a job was something that I knew I was going to have to do, something that would inevitably cut into this time in this special place.
I can still remember sitting and watching Jody slay her choreography and thinking about the pressure that she had to be feeling- to return to this place and how she must have felt like she had to prove herself all over again. Gram and I had talked about my needing to work and the anxiety I felt about being the new kid, in any situation really. It would be at least another decade before I would start to feel any sense of comfort in my own skin and so everything was scary at fifteen. Jody finished her performance on the screen in front of us and gram half-pointed at her little old television and said, “See what she just did? You do that. Feel afraid but act fearless until you really are.”
Many years later gram’s voice and those words play on a loop in my mind whenever faced with something that feels so much bigger and stronger than I can ever possibly be.
