My mother used to have the most beautiful dark auburn hair. in anticlimatic

I took 8th and 10th grade off of high school back during the Clinton administration. Well, technically it was called “home schooling,” but all I ever did was copy/paste the answers straight out of the answer booklet that was provided with the materials, and sent that back for my completion papers. I remember feeling slightly anxious the following year- having essentially ditched a number of classes I assumed to be essential building blocks. Never mattered. High school, it turns it, is more like watching Gilligan’s Island than The Wire. Jump in anytime, it always makes the same amount of sense.

During my 8th grade year I’d get up early- sometimes watch Sailor Moon on USA Network in the pre-dawn dark, and sometimes my mother (who was quite young back then) and I would go to the racquetball club to either work out on the machines or play racquetball. I remember riding in the van, on those mornings, half asleep- listening to 90s radio and watching the rain catch the sharp jagged lines of light from street lights and passing motorists- streaking down the windshield in lumpy waves. I remember feeling that warm radiant love for my mother in that time. That overwhelming appreciation you feel as an adolescent, but must hide.

The appreciation is a product of a certain coming of age- an awareness that this comfortable moment of youth, in which a responsible adult is looking after me and the world entire so that I can dream in comfort, will one day pass and it will be me holding responsibility for the well being of her and the world entire. Me warming the car, and fighting the water. This awareness is terrifying and saddening, and explains a possible root cause blind spot for why teenagers are the way they are.

This song reminds me of those mornings, for some reason. Mornings when the smell of coffee was new. When my skin had never seen a moment of hardship. When the most dire global and economic event for people to get riled up about was the president banging an intern.