ALWAYS

I was not alive during the eighties, so my perception of that decade comes to me through old photographs and cultural memories, which may or may not be entirely accurate.  In my rear-view mirror, the eighties were a time of weird hair and sometimes weird clothing, and music that is pretty hit and miss.  I can listen to the Nylons, especially this song, but otherwise I have a hard time getting past the heavily synthesized sound.  The eighties didn’t quite look or sound real.  To me, it’s like a world that never really happened.

A world that mostly never happened.  The eighties did bring me one important thing that made me possible.  There’s a video that I saw many times as a child, a piece of proof that those years were more than a collective American dream.    I used to love to watch it, the video of my parents’ wedding, and it was a piece of the eighties that never got old.

That video is the only reason I can listen to this song over and over.  The song is about as eighties as you can get - it’s got the synthesized accompaniment and strange echoing percussion - but I like it.  It played at the end of that video, over a montage of photos and a slow-motion version of the wedding kiss.  I associate it with the good part of the eighties, with a day when my father couldn’t stop grinning.

That day was twenty-four years ago.  A lot can happen in twenty-four years.  The eighties are long gone, and with them the weird hair, weird clothes, and weird music.  Most days, I feel like we could just forget that decade.  But it has brought us good things, like people whose hair didn’t stay weird.  Like my parents, preparing to become my parents.  I guess that’s what we do with the weirdness that is the past - we keep the good parts and just gloss over the rest.

That’s what I do, definitely.  Except for that song.  I can’t quite throw it out, especially because when the male voice sings that first line, I can hear my father singing it to my mother.  The way he looked at her in the slow-motion version of the kiss that sealed their marriage - he still looks at her that way.  He still kisses her like that.  He still looks like that guy that grinned all day on June 25, 1988, except maybe he’s got a little bit of grey in his hair.


The eighties brought me that.  So I guess I’ll keep them.