Now and Then

Last week was Lamps last day of therapy here in San Antonio.  So I took Zuzu down the street to the local Starbucks, ordered a croissant and enjoyed a little one on one time with my babe.  I got out my nursing cover and started to feed her.  Sitting there with my suckling baby the song Friend of the Devil by The Grateful Dead came on the Starbucks sound sytstem.  I started to sing along.  In my head.  C’mon, I’m not that lady.  Then I started thinking back to the time I saw the Grateful Dead in concert.  I was a junior in high school just outside of Denver, Colorado and naive as hell.  But I loved music.  And while I didn’t consider myself a hardcore Deadhead, I still liked their music.  In general classic rock pulsed through my veins–Led Zeppelin was as dear to me as air.

Anyway, I sat there nursing my (third) baby in a Starbucks in San Antonio, just down the street from the place where my second daughter goes for weekly physical therapy, remembering the details of that Grateful Dead show that seemed like a lifetime ago.  Since this was before the time of capturing every moment in some sort of digital format, the only pictures I have are in my mind.  I went with my friend Liz, but somehow we found my friend Jesse at the concert.  I remember looking up at Jesse and watching him bop and sway his head to the music thinking, Dude, you look ridiculous.  During some sort of intermission, or maybe before the show this slight, fragile girl with dreads in her hair comes up to me saying, “Hey sister….do you have any acid?”  I wasn’t shocked or anything, I just responded with a apologetic, “No.”  “Oh man…everyone is so dry here…” She said.  I just remember thinking, Too bad you happened to ask for acid from the token Mormon girl who hasn’t so much as sipped a beer or taken a single drag in her life.  Congrats on finding the proverbial needle (sober Mormon girl) in the haystack (Grateful Dead show).

But somehow that classic music loving, hippie cheerleader from Colorado and the mom of three girls nursing her infant in a Starbucks deep in the heart of Texas was the same person.  Granted there are far more paradoxical transformations out there.  But still, I found myself taking stock of my life, looking at these two very different periods of my life–20 years apart–with the past brought to memory and connected to the present by a single song.

And it’s a little cliche to say but 17 year old me, and 37 year old me were two very different people, but somehow still the same.  Weird.  And it’s not just about those two specific points in time, what about all the moments in-between?  That naive high school girl has since lived in Utah, Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Texas.  There was high school graduation, college, summer jobs, friends, parties, concerts, loneliness, bounty, love, heartbreak, church, work, music, travel, family, marriage, birth, death and whatever version of myself I was at the time.

Is this what 17 year old me thought 37 year old me would look like?  In some ways, yes.
Should I even care what 17 year old me thinks?  In some ways… yes.

Funny how a song/scent/word/image can take you through a time warp.  Ever have that sense of feeling like you’ve led multiple lives in the same life?  Like how was the little girl who lived in Nebraska the same girl who went lived in Hawaii hitchhiking her way around the island, who is also the same girl who had pink hair and rocked out at concerts and painted her way through college, who is also the same girl who is now a wife and mother of 3?  Sometimes it feels like I’ve led multiple lives, yet at the same times…it’s just me.  Anyone else relate?