Idol Minor Topic 1: “There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days"

The time between 6th and 7th grades was absolutely miserable.  If I didn’t cry every day, I still had reason to. I’d lost an uncle, two aunts and was having vivid nightmares of seeing them in their caskets.   My parents gave away a pet dog I adored; a beautiful male collie who was loving and comforting. I was awakening to the reality that I was adopted and felt confused by all of my mixed emotions about that. My dad and my best friend’s dad got into a horrible fight over the telephone because money, so my best friend and I were forbidden to ever see one another again. To add insult to injury, both math and gym class were kicking my ass.  Between never having a decent night’s sleep, bad grades, heightened awareness and too many life changes (losses) at once, being 13 was pure hell. 

I was lonely and took solace in my imagination and in the world of television, movies, books and performing artists I heard on the radio. I started a diary which was really a never-been-used-but-thrown-away red spiral-ringed binder. That item was just like me: discarded and left behind, but I could make it into something useful and dear to me. Maybe that was what being adopted was all about too.

I poured my guts out to that red notebook. It became my secret new best friend. I would sit on the floor between my twin beds where people couldn’t see me and write about my bad dreams, the mean kids at school who made fun of me, and how I missed the people and pets I no longer had in my life. I held a one-way conversation every night while listening to pop songs on my dad’s old radio he passed on to me when he bought a new stereo for the family room. I wrote and wrote and waited for days to pass and get better and took solace in the same 40 or so tunes the station played every evening. One of my favorites was Dobie Gray’s Drift Away.
 

Many of the lines in Drift Away were things I wanted my lost loved ones to know but could never articulate as a kid:
That I was thankful for the joy they gave me;
That I believed in their goodness;
That listening to songs was helping me to not feel so bad in an unkind wold;
and that having known them has made me a better person.

That song helped get me through because it was comforting and gave me something I could count on every evening before it was time to turn out the light. It was my ritual and it kept me sane.

Enjoy the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIuyDWzctgY