I had an
uncle who absolutely loved Fleetwood Mac, and on one very brisk March weekend
in 1989, he coerced me into listening to their new Greatest Hits album even
though I wanted very much to pop my New Kids on the Block cassette into my radio.
I lost that battle, but because I fell asleep that night to the intense and
brilliant guitar picking of Big Love, I awoke the next morning with a different
perspective.
That
Saturday morning, my Uncle and I cranked up the music again. My small cassette player speaker was no match
for his truck’s audio system, so it wasn’t long before we were outside washing
his truck, the sun peeking through the trees to warm us up just enough to not
shiver. We made our way through the album again, stopping to press the rewind
button a few times, and singing loud enough that my grandmother popped her head
out of the front door yelling, “Y’all are gonna wake the dead buried all the
way over at Erastus Church!” As she scuffed back into the kitchen in her robe
and house slippers, we laughed and kept singing. And because Keith had charge
of the water hose, he didn’t forget to soak me to the bone once the truck was
sparkling clean. I ran up the concrete steps to the front door screaming, water
streaming in behind me, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. She spun around from
the stove, mouth wide open, exclaiming “Keeeeiiithh! You’re gettin’ my floors
all wet!” Granny was never one to cuss much, but I know she definitely thought
about it in that moment. This made the whole thing even funnier, really. She
had to turn back towards the stove to keep me from seeing her grin.
Six days
later, Keith was gone, victim to an unrelenting epileptic seizure and a pre-911
ambulance staff who couldn’t find our house so deep in the woods. In the shock
and horror of the days following his death, I held onto the green cassette tape
we’d worn out the Saturday before, my last gift from my uncle. Eventually I
gave it back to Granny, whose long slender fingers curled around it as she
wept. At the funeral, my aunts had to
hold onto each of her arms to keep her from falling down, not because she was a
weak woman, but because losing her youngest son took the breath right out of
her lungs.
Keith was
only 28 years old, the baby of six children, and he still lived at home. Since
my mother had long ago left for Florida, I spent most every weekend there and
Keith felt much more like a big brother to me than an uncle. It didn’t hurt
that he was funny as hell. Once, on a Saturday, he shaved exactly one half of
his thick brown beard off his face. He walked around all day like that. He
watched television with his feet propped up on the ottoman, he helped make
dinner, singing so loud, “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies! Tell me tell
me tell me liiiiieeees! Oh no no no you can’t disguise, you can’t
disguiiiisssee!” We barely heard the
biscuit timer go off and later after dinner when he read the newspaper, he held
it up but not so high as to cover his face. I giggled all day long that day and
the thought of it all these years later still makes me smile.
When I was
still small enough to fit in his lap, Keith and I had a game we played with
feathers. Since the house was situated in a small clearing in the North Georgia
woods, there was usually a loose feather, a fallen leaf, or worst case, a dried
pine needle, that would work. The game went like this: we stared at each other
as straight faced as possible and took turns barely touching the feather along
the outline of each other’s lips. Whoever cracked up laughing or itching first
lost. It was a game of mental toughness that ended in fits of laughter and
shouts of “rematch!” again and again. I often laughed until my belly cramped.
Looking back on those moments now, I feel a pure and unconditional love.
I also
remember a time one hot summer when I was sunk in and side sleeping on the super
soft brown plaid couch that I think probably every middle-class home had in their
living rooms in the eighties. Keith decided that pouring ice water into my ear
would be a great way to wake me from my afternoon slumber. I woke with a start,
of course, and when I realized what happened, chased him out the back door and
all the way down our long driveway, with him laughing so hard he could barely
breathe let alone run fast.
Thank God
happy memories don’t fade very well. Especially when they have a soundtrack.
Through the
years, I turned to the music of Fleetwood Mac and the solo music of my favorite
member, their guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, to help me in my life. When I felt scared
for my future, their song “Don’t Stop” gave me comfort. When I felt lost in the
headwinds of change, the music represented stability, because it always gave me
exactly the words I needed to hear. When I was pregnant and searching for just
the right name for my daughter to be, I heard Fleetwood Mac play “Sara” live in
concert, and in a matter of a couple weeks, when I couldn’t stop referring to the
baby as Sarah, that became her name. “Down on Rodeo,” one of Lindsey’s solo
hits, reminds me of all the times I was too afraid to make the leap, or spent
too much time hanging in limbo before making major decisions. That song is a
sad call to action. “Shut Us Down” is a piercing look into the past fabric of a
long-term relationship, and provided me with some valuable insight years later
when I was going through my divorce. It takes pain to know pain, after all. And every single time I found myself
paralyzed with fear over anything, like passing my comprehensive exams as a
graduate student, “I’m So Afraid” became my elixir, soothing me into an
understanding that sometimes it’s okay to just sit with the fear rather than
run from it.
On October 24th, I finally had the chance to meet Lindsey Buckingham, a true rock-n-roll
god. As I held his hands and told him that I was grateful for the VIP
opportunity since I’d been waiting so long to meet him, he quietly whispered
“Awwwww” and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. We took a photo together and I
gave him a carefully written letter that I spent three days agonizing over. He needs to know how much Keith loved his
music, and I how much I loved my Uncle Keith. Some stories just must be told,
and as the letter hit Lindsey’s hand, I had a split-second vision of Keith,
beard half shaved, smiling down at me in excited approval.
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