A New Series!

 The other day, I was going about my usual weekday routine, returning calls to people who'd left messages at the agency where I work with music playing in the background - a perk of working from home.

I subscribe to a music service that gives me access to pretty much anything I want to hear. I usually pick an artist for the day, pull them up in the service, hit shuffle, and don't think about it anymore. But on this particular day, I happened to be between calls when the opening notes to one of the songs started. Just like that, I was back in my senior year of high school, hanging out at my friend "M's"  house with the rest of the group that felt like the entire world to me at the time.

Left to Right: R, me, K, and M. And no, there's nothing wrong with your computer screen. We were *that* pale.

The fall of my senior year, I had a slumber party for my 17th birthday. This was 1990, before grunge was a thing in our part of the country. The morning after the sleepover, the other girls and I went shopping at a big box store. We lived in a really small town. Big box stores were the only thing available nearby, and even that necessitated a drive to the next town over. 

One of us noticed a bin of flannel shirts on sale and remarked, "Oh, those are cool!" We each bought several of them and all showed up at school the following Monday wearing them, over t-shirts of bands that no one else had heard of or unpopular political slogans. (I had a collection of homemade shirts protesting the Iraq war. I'm sure you can imagine how popular that made me with my classmates at large.)

Soon we were known collectively as The Flannels. That spring, I'd say approximately 25% of the student population observed "Flannel Friday," dressing like us and mocking us all day. But it was worth it. Even though I'm not in touch with any of them anymore, even on social media, I've never had friendships quite like that ever again. We hung out together at someone's house pretty much every day after school. I spent almost every weekend night sleeping over at the house of my friend who didn't have a curfew. One of us worked at the local movie theater and got us passes for screenings and managed to get us into private screenings of films that weren't available for the genera public to see yet. It's funny - before we went into work-from-home mode last March, I drove by that movie theater every weekday since it's right across the street from my office. But that never brought me back to that time and place as vividly as the first few notes of "Just Like Heaven" by the Cure. 

I find memory really fascinating. So I'm starting a series here on the blog called "Wistful Wednesdays" where I'll visit other songs that can instantly transport me to another time and place, just like how this one put me so fully back in M's room that I could smell the incense burning, hear him picking out the notes on his guitar, see the far-off look on K's face and the glances R and I would share when K and M would get too PDA-ish (they were the coupled-off part of our quartet), and even feel the sleeves of my flannel shirt against my skin. And while I'm immensely glad to be done with high school and would not go back for all the money in the land, it's nice to be able to have those brief drop-in visits.