This evening I had the classic rock station on playing “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles, which is really a crossover country song. I had this very brief period age 17 or 18 when I liked to listen to the country music station in the kitchen. I used to stand there washing dishes and listen and imagine my future, someday, with my own little kitchen, busy domesticating for my future family. I was so eager to begin my adult life at 18! I imagined I’d get married right after college, of course to my current boyfriend, and we’d live somewhere that wasn’t Staten Island; I imagined it being Wichita, and I imagined lots of kids. Poor me! I had seen so very, very little of the world, literally and figuratively. How could I have formed any realistic vision? I did the best I could with limited information.
Anyway there I was tonight, washing lettuce leaves at the sink of my own little kitchen, listening to a country song while domesticating for my own family of one spouse and five goats. “All my dreams have come true!” I thought.
I can still sing for your a few bars of several top country hits of 1986-1987.
It’s funny how in my childhood home there was this pleasant little window above the kitchen sink, just like I have now. Well, I guess most homes have a window above the kitchen sink; but it helped with the memory.
So I’m only half-joking when I said my dreams had come true. They had. Just the details changed. Because people don’t change, only the details do; and the details naturally change based on all the contingencies of life. All the wacky things that had to align that had me marry the person I did and end up in this house with this crazy hobby of angora goats. I didn’t realize at 17 that this is the nature of life, and that the visions I was forming were just my current wild-ass guesses at the future, not to be set in stone. I took everything so seriously. I could not stray. I’m not sure if I could go back in time if it would do any good; I can’t see myself listening to me. I had to get whacked upside the head by real life to shake me out of my rigidity.
Tytania 