It has been a long time running.

Many years ago I worked with a girl named Sheila at the Chocolate factory in town. We were casual friends at work. She was the first person to sit with me during our lunch break. Finding somebody to sit with at lunch took him back to his days when he started attending a new school in the tenth grade. Well any grade for that matter. As a kid whose family moved often.  Something drew him to Sheila or maybe she was simply a nice person.The stories we create in our own minds, Sheila was much older than me and helped him find my way at the the chocolate factory. I had a radio at my desk that kept me company. I loved music almost to a fault. We listened to the local classical radio station because it had intense weather reports. Any hints of favorable running weather uplifted the spirits. He waited for that weather report everyday at 3:45 on WHYY in Philadelphia.

My lust for debits and credits noticeably diminished when I did not have lunch with Sheila.  I liked the breezy interlude of the day.  We bitched about our jobs, talked mostly about music and the big world outside of Reading, Pa.  About six months into his assignment she told me she was taking a vacation out west. I had never been out west and could not wait to hear about her trip. I realized this job was mundane and I was not all that good at it. I had a harder time faking it on the week that she was away. She was an ally whom I could confide. She was in payables and I was in inventory. There was a connection there. You accounting types might recognize the blurred connection.

One thing that kept me sane that week was going for a run after work. Outside of work I had plenty of friends and connections. My daily run kept me sane, fit  and semi-focused. We were also good at having a beer or three after the run. The debits simply were greater than the credits. It was his equity, it was his goodwill.  I knew I wasn’t an accountant. It paid the bills. I had very few bills back then, I did not know that at the time.

Sheila came back from her vacation with a new found verve, It seemed the vacation served her well.  On her first day back, she unexpectedly came to lunch ten minutes late. Sheila was the polite type, she was the punctual type. She timidly explained there was a journal entry that needed done. She was more animated than usual when she sat across from me, She told me about seeing the Rocky Mountains and long stretches of deserted road, and the night sky. She explained it in lovely detail. I was captured by the stories she told. One could see the wild west in his mind. This was something I always loved the night sky. Her descriptions were spectacular and made me want to head west and see it for himself.

Then she got all hushed and quiet and told me about an experience she had driving through the mountains at night . She said she was driving alone on a particularly star lit clear evening. She feverishly described how she loved the solitude of the drive. She described the twinkle of the stars in full detail. She described the constellations revealing themselves one star at a time. That is how I like to remember the story.

Then she explained how a song came on the Radio in the middle of the night and how the music was simply me. I was awestruck that she heard a song and the song made her think of me. Sheila was amazing, but it was the music that intrigued me.

That music was The Tragically Hip. The year may have been 1989. I never did get around to listening to the music Sheila described. I remembered the stories of the mountains and the stars and what mattered to them the most was the music.

I eventually did move west and heard the music of the Tragically Hip while finishing a running race in Ocean Shores, Washington. The music was pure and perfect, and is now a longtime companion of mine.

Don’t tell me what the poets are doing
Don’t tell me that they’re talking tough
Don’t tell me that they’re anti-social
Somehow not anti-social enough, that’s right