This Nostalgic Life is a free weekly publication rich with nostalgia brought to you by co-creators Eric Vardeman and Mick Lee. If this is your first time reading, you can subscribe using the button below so you don’t miss receiving any future issues delivered straight to your inbox.
Welcome to the 51st issue of This Nostalgic Life. In this issue, Mick and Eric are once again revisiting their past to tell stories around an old song. You know the kind of songs we’re talking about…they’re the ones that make up the mixtape of our lives. So settle in, and get ready to be taken back to another place in time with this week’s stories.
Working On Our Night Moves
by Mick Lee
There is a lost art in today’s world that my generation used to excel at, and that’s not broadcasting everything we do on social media. These days, if I want to see what the youth around town is into, all I have to do is pull up Facebook or Instagram and just start scrolling.
It doesn’t matter if they are our with friends, eating a tasty looking meal, or taking a dump, odds are you’ll find the play by play of everything that happens in their life on social media.
Back in my day we didn’t have these things with which to broadcast our lives. But even if we did, we were smart enough not to. A year or two ago, while on break at work, an eighteen year old kid that was new was showing off pictures from his phone while on break. He first showed them to several co-workers, and then he showed them to me.
The photos he was showing off was of him kissing some young lady in his car. He was laughing and talking about how mad her boyfriend was going to be when he saw the photos. I wasn’t impressed, and told him so. I relayed to him that it wasn’t the fact that the young lady had a boyfriend, but I told him the surest way to make sure he didn’t get to do that with her again was by broadcasting it like he did.
While it’s not something I’m proud of, yet I’m not really ashamed of either, back in the late ‘90s in my late teen years, I got around a lot. I had girlfriends that I went steady with, but at the same time, I would sneak off with another girl for a night of fun here and there. And I could go back to those same girls again and again because I was smart enough to not tell anyone about those last nights by the lake.
There was one girl in particular. Through several relationships with other girls, I would go back again and again to see this girl. And at the same time, she was in relationships with other guys. But we had this chemistry. We liked being together in certain situations. The kind of situations that involved back seats of cars in the dark of night.
She never told anyone, and neither did I. But we met up on an almost weekly basis for a couple of summers. We enjoyed each other’s company quite a bit. But neither of us felt the need to advertise it. Even though we never really talked about it, we both knew that it didn’t benefit either one of us to go around telling other people what we were doing.
As we both ended up getting serious with our steadies, things between her and I just sort of came to an end without even talking about that either. And even though it’s been more than 25 years now since our last encounter, I still think about that girl and those times. Especially in the summer time. When I’m just sitting on the porch with darkness all around me, and feeling a cool night breeze blowing, I can’t help but let my mind wander back in time to those nights long ago and smile.
Even though the song came out years before those encounters, Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” always comes to mind when I think about those times. It just always seemed to fit that situation.
We weren't in love, oh no far from it
We weren't searchin’ for some pie in the sky summit
We were just young and restless and bored
Living by the sword
And we'd steal away every chance we could
To the backroom, to the alley, or the trusty woods
I used her, she used me, but neither one cared
We were gettin' our share.Workin' on our night moves
Tryin' to lose the awkward teenage blues
Workin' on our night moves
Mmm, and it was summertime
Mmm, sweet summertime, summertime…
Until now, I’ve only ever shared this with one other person. And even at that, I never told the name or the details. Pretty much just what I’ve written here in this essay is all the detail I’ve shared. And I plan to keep it that way for the rest of my days.
That memory I keep just for me.
The French Connection
by Eric Vardeman
When I was a freshman in high school, I took French as my foreign language elective. I honestly don’t know why. I had no attachment to France or anything French and everyone I knew took Spanish instead. I hated French. HATED. It. To make it worse, I took French II my sophomore year of high school. However, unlike my freshman year, I know exactly why I took French II…a girl I met in French I. Two years of French and all I can say is “my pencil is big and yellow” (true 80’s movie fans will get that reference).
Everyone in French class had an immense dislike for our French teacher, Mrs. Jones. We were prohibited from speaking English once class started. Questions had to be asked in French or we were summarily ignored. So, yours truly, never got to ask a question but I usually didn’t know enough French to ask. I always had to have someone ask for me. We also had these workbooks that were about an inch thick that we had to do work in almost every day. I regularly earn unsatisfactory grades on my workbook assignments.
At this point, you’re asking “what in the hell does all of that have to do with this week’s topic?” Well, I’m glad you asked. Several issues back, I wrote about my summer of ‘86 soundtrack, the summer after I turned sixteen, the summer after my sophomore year. Towards the end of the school year, we were so fed up with French and Mrs. Jones that we decided that, on the last day of school, we were going to shred all the French workbooks we could get our hands on and gather up all the rolls of toilet paper we could and attack Mrs. Jones house in the middle of the night. We’d dump all the workbook confetti on the lawn and toilet paper the hell out of her trees and bushes.
We managed to get our hands on about fifty workbooks on the last day of school. We also got our hands on a paper shredder which made quick work of the confetti. There was a group of seven of us that were in on the plan. We were going to meet up at a friend's end of school party that night, consolidate all of our “ammunition” and head out from there. Around 10:30, we loaded up in two cars and headed off to our target. I was riding with my friend Rodney, who drove a beat up 60’s Corvair convertible. On the drive over, Rodney had Van Halen’s 5150 playing in the car. I specifically remember “Good Enough” blaring out of the speakers.
The plan was for the drivers to drop the troops off a few houses away from the target then pull down the street and wait for us to finish the job and catch up. Everything started out great. We crept through the dark to Mrs. Jones’ house, the confetti got dumped all over the yard and we started in with the toilet paper. Suddenly, the porch light came on, the driveway flood lights came on, and a camera flash started flashing. And that’s when we heard it:
“Bonjour. I see I have visitors.”
We had been made, the jig was up. In our excitement of planning in the days leading up to this caper, we apparently spoke of it a little too loudly. Either she had heard us or someone else heard us and told her. Either way, we were found out. When the lights came on, we all scattered like cockroaches. A guy named Joe and I took off running towards the getaway cars. For some reason, instead of running down the street, we took off running through yards, trampling shrubs and flowers, and knocking over lawn decorations. In the darkness, it looked like we were a couple of yards away from Rodney’s car when I heard Joe make a weird sound and could no longer sense him running right behind me. When I finally forced myself to stop running to check on Joe, I started laughing. The yard we had just run through had a new tree planted in it. You know the kind I’m talking about…the kind that’s held in place by stakes and ropes. Before that night, it had probably stood about six or seven feet tall. I say “had” because as Joe was running for the car, he ran straight into and over that tree. When I looked back, Joe was laying in the yard, tangled in tree and ropes. He yelled for me to keep going and I finally made it to Rodney’s car and jumped into the passenger’s seat. Moments later, Joe dove into Rodney’s tiny backseat, legs still hanging out of the car and we sped away through the neighborhood, laughing all the way, Van Halen still blaring on the speakers. To this day, when I listen to that album, that night is the first thing that comes to mind.
Thank you for joining us for this edition of This Nostalgic Life. If you read something here that connected with you, be sure to leave us a comment. We love hearing from all of our readers, and hearing their stories. Until next time, stay retro!
