{"id":800223,"date":"2019-10-09T15:45:41","date_gmt":"2019-10-09T21:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=372740"},"modified":"2019-10-09T15:45:41","modified_gmt":"2019-10-09T21:45:41","slug":"lark-ascending-you-love-the-thunder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/lark-ascending-you-love-the-thunder\/","title":{"rendered":"Lark Ascending: \u2018You Love the Thunder\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>

Christina Holbrook<\/strong>
Screen Shot 2019-08-02 at 3.10.04 PM<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cWhen you look over your shoulder<\/em>
And you see the life that you\u2019ve left behind<\/em>
When you think it over, do you ever wonder?<\/em>
What it is that holds your life so close to mine.\u201d<\/em>
\u2014 Jackson Browne, \u201cYou Love the Thunder\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The music starts rolling in months before our 40th high school reunion.<\/p>\n

Someone creates playlists of old songs, the soundtrack to our high school days in the late 1970s, and posts these on Facebook. The playlists have names like \u201cSlow Dance\u201d and \u201cOh Very Young.\u201d<\/p>\n

My husband, Alan, and I went to high school together and graduated in 1979. \u201cYou guys are coming to reunion, right?\u201d ask friends of ours, some of whom we have known since we were in grade school. \u201cYou have to come!\u201d<\/p>\n

As the playlists continue to appear, \u201cStill Crazy After all These Years\u201d and \u201cSweet 16,\u201d memories of my teenage self surface. I remember sitting beside Alan, our knees touching, listening to The Eagles at a classmate\u2019s 15th birthday party and wondering feverishly if I had the nerve to be a \u201cWitchy Woman\u201d (I did not, until much later).  And \u201cSweet Baby James\u2019\u201d \u201cdeep greens and blues are the colors I choose, won\u2019t you let me go down in my dreams?\u201d seemed to mirror my own fantasy-infused state of mind.<\/p>\n

By 16, I was a restless teenager. I felt the thunder and the rain in Jackson Browne\u2019s lyrics, and with Joni Mitchell, I dreamt of being free in Paris, unfettered and alive. Bruce Springsteen understood that, like so many other 18-year-olds, I was \u201cBorn to Run,\u201d and by my senior year, it was time to go.<\/p>\n

The weekend of our reunion begins with a memorial for classmates who have died.  It is so easy to remember them, and us, at 18: light as air, bright as fire. After the service, any hard protective fa\u00e7ades we might have arrived with are broken. Time has brought us all back down to earth, and we connect easily with one another.<\/p>\n

In the evening, we want to celebrate: \u201cRejoice, rejoice we have no choice but to carry on.\u201d Everyone is different from who they once were, and everyone is the same. In this group are more than 150 people \u2014 some I know well, others I vaguely recollect \u2014 most of whom seem at least to recognize my name. That sense of familiarity, of being known, is overwhelming and emotional.<\/p>\n

I end up talking to Bill, a music blogger at SoMuchGreatMusic.com and the classmate behind the playlists that have been flowing toward us for months.<\/p>\n

 \u201cWhy is the music of the \u201970s so great?\u201d I ask. \u201cAnd do I feel this way just because it\u2019s the music we grew up with?\u201d<\/p>\n

 \u201cIt is great!\u201d says Bill. \u201cIn the \u201960s, the music was hippy bands, flower power. And the \u201980s was the Gordon Gekko era \u2014 music was about attitude, anger, me first.<\/p>\n

 \u201cPeople make a mistake when they criticize the \u201970s for not having one recognizable style because that\u2019s exactly the point. This was an era of enormous breadth. There were so many incredible music genres that were all distinct and all occurring at the same time: Southern rock, soul bands, amazing singer\/songwriters and \u2014 toward the end \u2014 punk and new wave.\u201d<\/p>\n

We all had our favorites. Bill liked Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band. The Brewster Road rebels smoked weed and listened to the Grateful Dead. The super-achievers on the yearbook committee liked Billy Joel. The Crosby, Stills & Nash album \u201cD\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu\u201d was played incessantly in my studio art class.<\/p>\n

But we all listened to everything. \u201cWe might have drawn the line at disco, eventually,\u201d Bill jokes, \u201cbut really, there were not a lot of boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems to me it was an era of fluidity and moderation. We were comfortable with nuance, variety, contradiction; we didn\u2019t have to take sides. It would have been hard to imagine, back then, simplifying our likes and dislikes into the space of today\u2019s rigid online identities.<\/p>\n

What is it, 40 years later, that holds our lives so close to each other\u2019s? The mellowing of age, for sure, and perhaps the somber recognition of time\u2019s passage.  <\/p>\n

And the music we grew up with. It taught us that even if we love some songs or artists more than others, in the end, our hearts are big enough to appreciate them all.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry about tomorrow, Lord, you\u2019ll know it when it comes,<\/em>
When the rock and roll music meets the risin\u2019 sun.\u201d<\/em>
\u2014 Grateful Dead, \u201cOne More Saturday Night\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Christina Holbrook\u2019s column \u201cLark Ascending\u201d publishes biweekly in the Summit Daily News. Holbrook writes about life in the mountains, from the beauty of the natural surroundings to the quirkiness of friends and neighbors to what makes a good life. She moved to Breckenridge in 2014 and is the author of \u201cWinelands of Colorado.\u201d Contact her at<\/em> peak1studio@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christina HolbrookScreen Shot 2019-08-02 at 3.10.04 PM \u201cWhen you look over your shoulderAnd you see the life that you\u2019ve left behindWhen you think it over, do you ever wonder?What it is that holds your life so close to mine.\u201d\u2014 Jackson Browne, \u201cYou Love the Thunder\u201d The music starts rolling in months before our 40th high […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-800223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 04:07:17","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}