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Rakin’ to the Oldies Journal Entry: October 19, 1985 (age 16) Our yard at the corner of West End and Highland avenues in Binghamton has more trees than Roberson at Christmas. That means my brother Dan and I spend every Saturday during autumn in the yard, raking leaves. To combat the drudgery of this mundane task, we have developed certain rituals. The most important of these is hooking together three extension cords so we can play cassettes on Dan’s boom box while we’re outdoors. We take turns choosing the tapes to play. Dan is up on the latest music, so he plays things like Hunting High and Low by A-ha, or Songs From the Big Chair by Tears For Fears. I usually choose something older, like History: America’s Greatest Hits, or, if I really want to annoy Dan, Yesterday Once More by the Carpenters. But the most important ritual takes place once all the leaves have been raked into several huge piles. Then each of us watches for a moment when the other is distracted. Today it was me who let his guard down, singing along with the chorus to “Top of the World.” Dan leapt into action, blindsiding me with a brutal tackle into the pile of leaves I had just finished. In a flurry of pale, freckled arms and Wrangler jeans, it took no more than two minutes to undo half of our work. We spent the next 15 minutes working together to clean up the desolation from our brotherly Wrestlemania. But the armistice was not meant to last. Dan’s next boombox selection was Killer on the Rampage, by Eddy Grant. This choice would not normally incite me to violence, but I had watched some of the hearings of the Parents Music Resource Center this week on TV. I sympathized with Sen. Al Gore’s wife Tipper when she was getting picked on by Frank Zappa, so I decided to prove the center’s point by succumbing to the dangerous elixir of rock music and teenage anger. With a beautifully executed slide tackle, I sent Dan headfirst into his pile of leaves. He parried with a well-timed shove of wet leaves into my open mouth. With a muffled shout of “Uncle!” I went inside to pick the debris out of my braces. As brothers, we had unspoken rules about not hitting each other in the face when we were fake-fighting or wrestling. Dan sensed that he had tread on that invisible boundary by forcing me to consume multi-colored roughage. Feeling guilty, he finished the rest of the yard work himself. Later, he also let me get a ride with him and his friends to our high school’s football game. There we watched other youths pummel each other in the name of good sportsmanship. I bet it’s the rock music kids are listening to these days that drives them to it. I’m thinking of writing to Tipper to tell her how even the lovelorn vocals of Karen Carpenter transform my brother into a vicious animal.
©
2005 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin
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