Pick a Year

[saavedra77]

I purloined this meme idea from cakeface:

Cite a year between 1967 and 2007 in your comment, and I'll tell you how I remember it. If it's too far back for me to clearly recall, I'll fill in the gaps with family lore and/or plausible surmises.

Hint: election years are good. I've been paying attention to those since I was in single digits.

Comments

[cakeface.livejournal.com]

1982! I was -2. What were you up to?

After They've Seen Paree ...

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

I was a mopey fifteen-year-old in 1982, bookish, disheveled, but secretly kind of full of myself. My mom, grandma, and I lived in an old mill town called Mount Holly that then served as a bedroom community for Fort Dix. I went to Rancocas Valley Regional High School, where portions of the movie Eddie and the Cruisers were filmed, that year.

1982 was an exciting time, actually--it was a year of firsts, for me: I attended a séance, visited New York City, I took my first a transatlantic flight, spent a week in a major European capital, walked through palaces and cathedrals, got drunk, stayed out until four in the morning, got my first taste of being on my own.

My best buddy that year was this Billy Idol-looking junior named Fred. Fred got me listening to the Clash, the Gang of Four, the Dead Kennedys, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and X. I was also listening to bands like the English Beat, the B-52s, and the Talking Heads, then.

I had by this time settled into a what would turn out to be a lifetime habit of voracious reading: that year's list of literary conquests included Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Glass Key; Steinbeck's Cannery Row; and Hermann Hesse's Damien, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Siddhartha.

The major event of the year, however, was the trip to France. This had actually come as a something of a surprise. My French class was going in the spring, but I just assumed that my family couldn't afford it. Grandma didn't really react when I first told her about the trip.

But, then, on the day before the registration deadline, she just quietly handed over the check and said "bon voyage."

(Well, no, she didn't literally say that. I don't think that she knew a word of French, but it was something similarly laconic.)

A few weeks later, we flew out of JFK. I'd in fact never been to NYC, before, even though it was just two hours away. My first impression was that the whole area looked like the apocalypse. From North Jersey's miles of industrial wasteland (think of the opening credits to The Sopranos) to the spiraling descent into the Holland Tunnel to downtown's grey, grimy, crowded streets, I found the whole thing pretty depressing.

On the other hand, Paris seemed impossibly perfect. I loved how this deep sense of history positively radiated from the architecture. We did most of the usual things: the Louvre, Notre Dame, Sacre Couer, shopping on the Champs Elysées. We didn't bother with the Eiffel Tower, because the lines were just impossible.

We were given an amazing, possibly inappropriate amount of freedom to explore the city on our own, too. The Metros were a revelation--clean, fast, cheap. Fred (who was along for this trip, too) and I spent a day hanging around Monmartre listening to buskers, watching street artists, hanging out in cafés. Groups of us went out clubbing at night, and nobody seemed to give a rat's ass about our ages. Coming back to our hotel one night, I swear the taxi crossed the Seine three times, running up the meter. (Then again, we were drunk adolescent tourists, and kind of asking for it ...)

We spent the following week on a bus tour of the Loire Valley, Normandy, and Brittany. We wandered around Versailles, whiled away an afternoon oohing and aahing at Chartres Cathedral, and then spent the most gorgeous day of the entire trip at Mt. St. Michel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._St._Michel), climbing up that steep, winding road to the monastery. At the top, we soaked up the awesome view across the Channel and watched the tide sweep back across the flood plain, turning the mountain into a virtual island.

In short: Best. Vacation. Ever.

Re: After They've Seen Paree ...

[cakeface.livejournal.com]

(You're making me travel-hungry again. UNFAIR. :D)

Thank you for sharing that - it's beautiful.

Re: After They've Seen Paree ...

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Aw, thanks ... :)