Memories of the Reagan Administration

The hymn “Sweet Home Chicago” from the Blues Brothers flick takes me away like Calgon to Old Miami and the reassuringly roast beef subs at SDS brought back to the dorm room & served with the relish of years of college ahead amid the dense foliage of a school full of drink and prose and parties on fire escape landings.

I recall a singular glandular moment, the summer still regnant in early fall and the beer tap sitting on a landing full of the pungencies and the dire, siren calls of haste. Like Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, the theme of college was haste and hurry was built into the DNA of the young and helpless. Every Saturday night was at once endless and preciously brief; we knew the hourglass was against us.

There was something especially powerful in “gatoring”, a dance maneuver inspired by “Animal House” that urged us to get a little bit softer now by the simple expediency of moving our bodies downward towards the ground, it affording an almost-intimacy. How rich that merely a shift in the body’s position could elicit such mutual excitement! But we were young and heady and already drunk on the lyrics of “Yes”:

I can feel no sense of measure
No illusions as we take
Refuge in young man`s pleasure
Breaking down the dreams we make
Real

What is it that Yes, a band that barely broke my consciousness except for the single concert in 1985, should be so posthumously potent? What is it about that song that suddenly so defines an era? I could never have imagined at the time that Yes's Leave it would be the portal of time travel. It was then OPS - "other peoples's song". But their song became my song too inadvertently through the magic of nostalgia.