Reeling In The Years (indeed!)

I was about ten years old, maybe nine, walking across the patio at Lake Ontario. It was a burning, golden summer day with a buttery, steady breeze. As I made it to the railing to stare at the light winking at me off the waters of a late July day, I was thunderstruck. The AM radio was playing something that stopped me as clear, crystalline drops of guitar fell all around me. It was Steely Dan’s Reeling In The Years.

I lost touch with it for awhile. I got to high school, and could not recall the title or the artist, and I was walking across the RIT campus, watching students play Frisbee outside as my brother and his fellow students unloaded their dorms to go home for the summer. And there it was, and I was transported back to being a careless young boy, and the feeling that day and the perfectly tolerable heat and the breeze and the light show came back. I asked some guy who it was and he re-educated me. I bought the LP with my allowance a few days later and played the track repeatedly for days. I could not grow tired of living on that cloud.

Steely Dan disappeared for awhile and came back in the 1990s. I was lucky to go see them at SPAC in 1994. It was a cool, August evening – one of those ones where you still don’t need a jacket and you laugh at those who wear one anyway. Yeah, I could see my breath – but I am from Syracuse, damnit! I walked to class at Oswego in shorts in a lake effect blizzard! I bond with Steve Dittmar over this!

They introduced the song with a bouncy piano intro and carried into the sweet melody with horns that washed over like a warm, ocean wave. Bath water in the cold of Saratoga.

We were walking out from under the amphitheater because a friend told me I had to hear how it sounded outside. When we crossed the threshold, the background singers added campfire smoke to the air and it instantly intoxicated me. There, in the cool Adirondack evening, shivering and denying it, I stopped and instantly felt the wind ripping through my unkempt hair, as clean as the star that smiled on me that day as a child. It never fails.

They changed the chorus a little with the girls who sang it, they bent up from some diminished chord – a half step? A whole step? I don’t know that detail, I just know am tied into the magic of that sweet, lilting tension hanging in the air like an aural June bug, and for that amount of time, and as magical as that appears to the child when he first sees it.

These moments are burned in me and come back to life in sharper relief than my eyes ever saw.

Yeah, I like the song. I can think of a handful of others that get me iike this. Watermelon In Easter hay is one of them. I’ll tell you about that, later : )