This is the third in a series of mostly fictional stories inspired by favorite song lyrics. They center on a small Montana radio station.
A light rain was falling as Garrett pushed his cart out of the Missoula Home Depot. “Never fails,” he said out loud. He’d finally gotten around to buying the chicken wire and short steel posts to fence off his fruit and vegetable patch and now he wondered if the weather was going to postpone that project yet again. He and his wife Rachel were growing tired of finding half-eaten tomatoes lying on the ground and vines picked clean of berries. “Probably a raccoon,” he had told her, “Or maybe even a coyote if he’s really hungry.” The growing season in Montana was short enough as it was – they didn’t need critters pilfering their crop. Rachel was fond of canning what they didn’t eat fresh.
Garrett pulled the hood of his windbreaker over his head and brought the cart to a stop behind his blue Ford F150. He hefted the fencing materials into the bed, dutifully pushed the cart a short distance to the “Please Return Carts Here” space, and walked briskly back to the truck as the rain started to fall in earnest. The forecast he’d read on his iPad earlier that morning had called for clearing skies in the afternoon, so maybe he could at least get a start on the fence project. He’d be working solo, as Rachel had volunteered for some overtime at Providence St. Patrick Hospital where she worked as an ER nurse. COVID had blown through the medical staff, leaving the hospital routinely short-handed. Fortunately, Rachel had thus far escaped unscathed. She and Garrett were fully vaxed and boosted, and she was obsessive about wearing every form of personal protective equipment available when she worked. Nearing retirement, the last thing she needed was to fall victim to the pandemic.
As the engine in the truck fired up, so did the radio, and Garrett heard the DJ say, “This is Carrie Slater on KHDV in Darby. It’s 10:47 on this drippy Saturday morning and I’m glad to have you along for the ride on 107.9 The Drive, western Montana’s number one choice for the best in classic rock. Next up is what I think is one of the prettiest songs John Lennon ever wrote. Here are the Beatles with ‘In My Life.’” Garrett reached over to turn up the volume. He’d been a Beatle fan for nearly 50 years, starting the day that his older sister Bonnie had brought home her copy of “Meet the Beatles,” their debut album in the U.S. As the vocal section of the song began, Garrett softly sang along:
“There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever not for better. Some have gone and some remain.”
Garrett sat in the truck, staring absently out the window as the wipers rhythmically swiped away the raindrops. He was thinking about Sandra, his college girlfriend. They had met at one of those freshman orientation events, a barbecue on the lawn outside the Whittier College library. He was actually a sophomore at the time, having transferred to the small private school after a year at East Los Angeles Community College. He and Sandra had hit it off from the start. It turned out they were both English majors with a mutual love of reading. She introduced him to feminist authors like Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing, and he shared his love of Beat Generation writers including Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan. They had a number of classes together, including English Romanticism and Shakespearian Drama, and they routinely critiqued one another’s term papers.
Sandra and Garrett were together for his three remaining years at Whittier. During the summers, she would head home to Palo Alto, but they managed to see one another two or three times before the fall semester reunited them at school. Back then, a ticket to the Bay area on Pacific Southwest Airlines could be had for $29, so Garrett would fly to San Francisco or he would pick Sandra up at Burbank Airport for a long weekend. They both had summer jobs to help with tuition, of course, so extended visits weren’t an option. She worked at a place called Second Sole that refurbished worn-out running shoes, and he was a parts chaser for a pipeline construction company. Long distance phone calls were still expensive in those long-before-cellular days, so they mostly kept in touch by mail.
Sitting in his truck, still idling in the Home Depot parking lot, Garrett gently smiled. He couldn’t begin to remember the last time he had actually written a letter. He had kept all of Sandra’s for a number of years, stuffed inside a shoe box together with some of the poetry he had written in college. Being a year ahead, Garrett graduated before she did, and that event pretty much marked the beginning of the end of their relationship. They kept in touch with letters during that summer of 1977, but by September when Sandra headed back to school, Garrett was busy looking for a job where he could somehow use his college degree. Up until then, the year that separated them in age had not really mattered, but now it seemed so much more significant, as though they were living in different worlds which, in reality, they were. There was never a phone call or a letter to mark an official break-up – just a mutual drifting apart.
Within a few months, Garrett met Rachel. Their courtship was rapid, and by July of the following year they were married. Now and again Garrett thought of Sandra, and he assumed she had graduated from Whittier. Respect for his marriage to Rachel prevented him from contacting his old flame, but memories and curiosity brought her to mind every now and then. He hoped she was doing well.
Several years later, when Garrett and Rachel had bought their first house, he was sitting in the den thumbing through the quarterly Whittier College alumni magazine. As usual, he started at the back, in the section titled “Alumni Connections.” He enjoyed finding familiar names in the lists of marriages and births. That evening, however, his eyes fell on a name in the “In Memoriam” column. “Sandra Cooper, Class of 1978, passed away in March of 1982 from breast cancer.” Stunned, he uttered aloud, “Oh my God.”
All these places have their moments, with lovers and friends I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living. In my life, I’ve loved them all.
With a deep and audible sigh, Garrett put the truck in gear, backed out of his parking spot, and headed for home.
Don't you have anything better to do with your time than make the rest of us writers look bad? 🖌️