Old Friends

This week I have been spending a lot of time downloading music from my cd's to the computer and then uploading them onto my iPod. Everyone predicted this would be the case if I ever got an iPod because: a) I am musically obsessed and b) I own an obscene number of cds.

In the process of scouring my CD collection for music suitable to be on my iPod, I came across an old cd that some friends of mine made in high school. Their band was called The Creation Band and they were really good. Surprisingly, they weren't just good back then because I was in high school and all the other garage bands were terrible. This band was really good. The members were all a little too obsessed with reggae culture as some privileged white adolescent boys tend to become during high school -- but we could forgive them because they were good friends and they were talented musicians – we got over the dreadlocks and fake Jamaican accents.

The summer after high school while I was working two jobs and preparing for college, The Creation Band went on tour. I believe that is when they recorded their album. When I left for college, I had a tape of the album and I played and played it as a way to stay connected to my friends and to avoid becoming too homesick. In fact, I played it so much that the ribbon wore out and I could only listen to a few songs at the beginning of the tape and a few songs at the end. My sophomore roommate became enamored with one of the band members because she thought he had a sexy voice. I thought she was slightly insane, but we kept listening until it became really obvious that the tape was not going to work anymore.

During the spring of my senior year in college, the band's trombone player, my first boyfriend and subsequently one of my really good friends, Carl, died of a brain tumor. Sometime shortly after I flew home to speak at his memorial, I received a CD in the mail from his parents. It was the Creation Band album. I was thrilled since I had reluctantly retired the tape two years earlier. Of course, the music was something different now... it was music to listen to if I wanted to cry. I would find the tracks that featured Carl playing his trombone and crank them up and sob. This weepy stage lasted a while and the CD went into storage...until this week.

Out of the five or six band members that I was friends with in high school, today I am in touch with one. I know that one of the guitarists moved to Spain recently and I ran into the lead singer at a gas station in Santa Fe not too long ago. He looked different and the same...mostly older. I was thrilled to see him and we chatted for a little while. It wasn't a terrible encounter, you know one of those awkward conversations with tons of silent pauses, but it also could have gone more smoothly. We didn't fall back into the old familiar rhythms of conversation...and I suppose that doesn't happen with too many people. Friendships that pick up right where they left off despite the distance of time and space are few and far between.

I used to mourn these faded friendships. In high school, you love your friends fast and hard. They are family. I still miss the people who have drifted away from me… And today, when I listened to the Creation Band CD for the first time in four years, I felt like I got some of those friends back in a small way, at least for a moment. The Creation Band has turned into a happy memory of old friends and past times, a connection to who we were back then…I am so grateful to have this music that can take me back.