The static of the AM waves played the latest and greatest of the day. It could be rain or snow on the windowsill. It did not matter. We did not have fancy kitchens, the latest luxuries, or anything that the average American family had. What the peddlers flashed in front of our faces, we knew one thing. That would never be us. We did not need any of that.
In the old brick schools built at the dawn of the twentieth century, the hum of heavy fluorescent ballasts vibrated the fixtures hanging above our heads as we listened to the old steam radiators bang and tick, and drizzle fell on a gray day outside the window. When lunchtime came, we put on coats and were led across the street and downstairs into the basement. It was just right, perfect in every way. No one complained about anything. The workers around us were born in the 1920s, and I can still see some of their faces.
The war on television had finally rested. To us, it was two-dimensional: a quiet stranger sitting at the lunch table, alone. No one ever sat with her, and even avoided her table if possible. She was lured by no campaigns or flashy promises of wealth and status. But she knew something we did not; we, and now she, were already rich. She was appreciative of all that I took for granted. We were so small-minded, and we had no idea. She was beautiful, and I did not know it.
The world at that time seemed chiseled in granite, but was actually a static bubble losing structural integrity, one molecule at a time. They say a star burns brighter just before its end, and that was certainly true in nineteen hundred seventy-five. Mister Ingram, I listened as your voice echoed and boomed over my radio, asking the grey line to allow the lowest levels of the ionosphere to rapidly disappear until tonight. I would hear your footsteps pass my door once again.
I did not know yet. As I stood across the street, I saw the light of a cigarette, and the shadowy figure whose face I could not see until decades later, when all of this was only a memory from a million miles away. But the feeling never ended. The vacuum tube world in which we lived felt so real, so tactile, and permanent. I was only ten, but I wanted to know everything and everyone.
Radio, then, just a mere 55 years old, had captured me, and it was a ride that was going to whisk me away into everything that followed. Here now, 105 years after that first day in 1920, we may never be able to tell the tale of a world that used to be so much bigger. Today, generations of people will never know what it was like to be marooned in your small corner of an infinite planet, and over the airwaves, through the unfamiliar voices of people you would never meet, learn about their land. See it. Feel it. Touch it.
At first, I met the kids in the neighborhood, and in an AM rock world that seemed good enough. It wasn't until darkness fell, and they all ran away from me, leaving me alone. It was deafly silent, and I knocked on doors looking for someone who dared stand up to the long and dark night. Down the alley, I thought I heard something. I stepped cautiously, trying to keep my steps silent. Although her voice was faint, it was coming from a blowtorch 400 miles away.
I pushed open the door, and inside I found a world that no one challenged. Fifty years ago, in 1926, all of this began, and there was no stopping it. Beverly met me as I walked in, and suddenly, I wanted nothing to do with those who lived on my block. They had been holding me down, and I had not known it.
I visited until my eyes grew heavy and I was swept away in a land of dreams where she sang to me as I drifted. I heard a peculiar song that I would never hear again, thinking that perhaps I had dreamed it, until Danny arrived. He got up bright and early to be the first kid on the block to say good morning to me, even though his block was 400 miles away. As the ionosphere dissipated under solar assault, I sat as the day warmed, looking forward to visiting this very unique club where I found friends I could never find elsewhere.
This was only the beginning of my journey into the night to a place where I belonged. The world was disappearing on us. The world we thought could not fail was indeed terminal. When I came to the end of the road, I was offered a journey into the past, and I took it. I got to meet friends who had come before I lived there, and that was so precious to me. Even that had to come to an end. I guess it is really over, this wonderful journey into the upper atmosphere where we used to live, jump, and breathe. But I also know that someday, just maybe, someone will dust off some old real-to-reals and let us take one more excursion into skywave propagation.
One, Five, Two, O; One, Five, Two, O...
(what inspired this: Captain and Tennille Lonely night / Neil Sedaka Bad Blood / 1975 James St)
