Caught in the Carousel

Letter from the Editor - February 2009

One of the greatest things of this young new year has already happened.

Let me explain.

On the first day of 2009, I found myself in the park long into the evening, battling on the tennis court with a 20-year-old kid from Seattle who hit a huge first serve, a low, skidding slice backhand and a big topspin forehand that. as soon as it touched the earth, shot back into outer space with the most insane, wicked arc that I've ever seen.

Somehow—experience, time-addled wiles, a Faustian bargain—I managed to barely beat him, and it took three hours and probably three years off my life. When we were done, he seemed fine—in fact, he was off to meet his girlfriend for a night run on the trail—and his ability to bounce back made me pine for the unbreakable days of youth, and the seemingly bottomless reservoirs of strength and energy. I remember playing a match this long when I was twenty and then going to see Springsteen later that night. It was a marathon concert and I stood tirelessly for every second of the four-and-a-half hour set.

Thinking of that now makes me woozy.

At any rate, I'm thirty-eight, I don't recover the way I used to and after such a Herculean feat, I needed to sit down, take handfuls of Advil and wince away my stiffness with feeble stretches on the grass.

It was late, it was dark, the fog was in and the park was still.

And in that stillness, I heard the only sound around and that was of a band rehearsing in the amphitheatre above the courts. They were playing acoustic guitars and one guy was pounding away using brushes on a single drum and they weren't bad. They were melodic and smart and they had hooks that emerged through the fog that, even stripped down, were practically radio ready.

But then they dispersed and as I groaned and stretched, I watched a guitarist and a drummer walk past me and disappear into the night. A few minutes later, I heard a lone acoustic guitar pounding away, pure and pristine, ringing out in the darkness like something true and necessary.

And then a voice:
"Better stop dreaming of the quiet life/'Cause it's the one we'll never know..."

It was The Jam's "A Town Called Malice" being played with all the necessary Wellerian purpose and it was positively sublime. The singer's voice was young and tough like Weller in his punky prime, but it was sweeter around the corners, smoother on the syllables—almost honeyed, like Paul Heaton in his Housemartins days.

It made me feel like I could play three more sets or three more hours. It made me feel like I was listening to a new year really start—forget fireworks and midnight kisses and balls being dropped in crowded cities; this was how it should be. This was the way things were supposed to begin; with a clamor, a chime, a pop song.

And then the music stopped and the musician vanished—probably took the other way out of the park so I never saw him go.

But it left me far more breathless than anything that had happened on the tennis court. It left me looking through the fog for other sudden amazements.

And of course nothing happened after that. I sat on the grass, watched the lights of cars glide by across the street, heard a guy call out to his kids, "Stop fighting, you can both carry the popcorn."

It was the night. It was the suburbs. It's the architecture around the thrills in life that make us forget they're there.

We've got a great issue to start off 2009. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading and making CITC a part of your everyday life.
We mention you frequently in our Courage Journal.

Love and Rockets,
Alex Green
Editor, Caught In The Carousel
Alex670@earthlink.net