“I’m taking myself out for sushi, and 3EB’s ‘How’s it Gonna Be’ came on and I thought of you.”

A text last Thursday from my high school best friend redirected my mental GPS straight down Memory Lane.

The past rushes up to meet me.
Wanna hop in?

I am in the driver’s seat of my gold Jeep Grand Cherokee, swinging by to pick the girl at the top of my street up for school at the crack of dawn.

I am walking up the south ramp of Shawnee Mission East high school, past Mr. Nichols’s classroom, where I got in trouble once for reading Gone With The Wind instead of learning world geography.

I am opening my locker, surprised by a bright yellow smiley-face balloon with a note attached: “You’re the magic that holds the sky up from the ground,” it reads, quoting my favorite Ben Folds Five song. “Will you go out with me?”

I am with that note’s author one unspecial summer day, listening to Barenaked Ladies, in his dad’s quiet, sunny house.

I am at the kitchen table in that same house, watching my two best guys paint tiny metal Warhammer figurines, grass stains inching up the sides of their sneakers from their summer jobs mowing lawns.

I am living, breathing teenage bliss. 😌 

Suddenly, I am back in the present. It’s Saturday afternoon in Kansas City, and I am sitting on a worn leather sofa in a coffee shop with my oldest friend.

We’ll turn 40 within two weeks of each other and are living very grown-up lives. 
He has a mustache now.

He of the yellow balloon and the grassy shoes and the Warhammer figurines.

We catch each other up on our lives: his persistent thyroid cancer, my impending knee surgery, his dating life, my marriage, his new career as a cardiac ICU nurse, my 10-year career as a copywriter and marketer.

I am deeeeeeeeeply nostalgic:
⌛️ For a time when car lease payments or mortgages were handled by parents. (When money wasn’t real.)
⌛️ When I didn’t know how wildly problematic Gone With The Wind is.
⌛️ When latex, helium, and string constituted a grand romantic gesture.
⌛️ When seeing RENT as a 15-year-old left me sobbing on W. 41st St. without a clue what AIDS was.
⌛️ When friendships were simple. 
⌛️ When I was ignorant as hell.

All thanks to a song that still makes me cry when I hear it on the right day.

Satellite radio has a sense of humor and plays “How’s It Gonna Be” as soon as I climb in the car to go back to my parents’. I take the long way home.