“Oh mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?”
— “Landslide”
Fleetwood Mac, 1975
The season my girlfriends and I turned 16, the anthem playing the very loudest on all of our radios was most likely to be anything by Fleetwood Mac.
That summer my friends would come to get me after the evening milking was done, after they had likely spent the day together having a blast at a pool somewhere. I was always playing catch up with their free-wheeling, wide open days. I was the only one with a midnight curfew, the Holstein herd limiting my time to be a carefree kid.
We most often piled into the first Honda Civic any of us had ever seen, and Carolyn accepted our dollar bills to put toward filling up the gas tank. She shared this car with her brother, and its great gas mileage was far better than any of the large family cars the rest of us had access to driving.
Windows down, we let our shy self-consciousness fly away as we cranked the radio loud. We knew every lyric to any Fleetwood Mac song that played, and we belted them out as though we were on a sound stage somewhere, singing for our supper.
We took to the open country roads with no particular place in mind. Most often we drove through Mohican State Park, then stopped to take in a little hike somewhere if the weather was good. Or we would tool around through town to see if we ran into anyone we wanted to hang out with for a short time.
Even though we had no place to be, just like everyone else we acted as though we did. Gas was cheap and we paid little mind to burning through it as we hurried to go nowhere fast.
None of us had known heartache or loss, the reality of life struggles still far in the future. The only nightmares we shared revolved around something like a pop quiz in chemistry finding us totally unprepared or a hard-nosed teacher who refused to grade on a curve.
To this day, when I hear a snippet of a Fleetwood Mac song, I am propelled back to that free and easy summer in a way that nothing else can evoke. Riding shotgun, handing Carolyn extra quarters when we stopped for a cheeseburger or a coney — it was the best of times for all of us.
