My own 1979

It was a longtime after the song stopped being popular before I got to think about the song itself. I was caught up in the video for 1979. Most of the Smashing Pumpkins videos take my attention away from the song, making me go back to the song after the TV has dropped them. I found the band to be a bright spark in a deadening charts system. A lot of the other music was beginning to bore me, but a Smashing Pumpkins track would have my ears and eyes open again. Eventually, I thought of my own 1979.

I was thirteen in that year. I had recently started to severely dislike school. High school was just as much an annoying intrusion into my free time as elementary, but came with the added horrors of teasing, bullying, and my becoming very much overweight. I started up two brand new hobbies, campanology and horseback riding. The former lasted a decade, the latter just a year. I wanted to learn to ride a horse properly, but it cost a lot of money and I could not relate to the horse as anything other than a very high and wobbly kind of chair that was alive at the time. On my fourth or fifth lesson, I had a different horse that reared up to tease me. That horse knew I was petrified and had no connection or understanding of it. I did not try riding again until an adult.

1979 was also the year my grandfather died. I was the sole eccentric in our family then. We both had a taste for the unusual, unconventional side of life and got on well. His was my first funeral. I blushed but could not stop my urge to giggle. I did control the laughter, but not the desire to do so. For some reason, seeing all my relations wearing dark somber clothing and looking forlorn just did not connect in my mind to my grandpa. He was a jolly fellow, smiling, joking, and playing about, far from stern and starchy. I felt that it being his funeral, it should have been more his style. I was the only one present that acted that way, though.

New enjoyments, old miseries, and death all entered my life in 1979. Hearing the song without seeing the video, these memories come to play in my mind. If the video is played along with the song, my mind does not even think of my own 1979, though.