What were you thinking of when you dreamt that up?
Rock stars: if you didn’t want to be one, you wanted to marry one. I fell into the latter category when I was about 12 and I am not naming the band or member of said band for reasons of non-Googlability. See last night, I made this great salmon and I got the recipe from a blog I follow which is a cooking blog, yes, but at the same time not really. It’s written by a former model who was married to the guy I wanted to have babies with when I was 12. Well, not when I was 12, but I imagined he’d wait. Instead, I discovered at 13 while on line at a checkout during a family vacation that he’d married this model. I was, let us say, saddened. I bought the People magazine and I think I still have it but I am not going down to my storage area to find out. Apparently, they had quite the wedding but they divorced ages ago.
I have long wanted to write about this woman’s blog because I can’t figure out what to make of it and the way I sometimes do that is to write about those kinds of things here. If it was merely a cooking blog, I doubt I’d subscribe. I mean, I do have lots of baking blogs on my feed reader and maybe a couple of food ones, as well, but the recipes on this one, I think, wouldn’t be enough to draw me. Each post, though, begins with some photos of her past and description of some wonderful time with the band in Ibiza or modeling for a fancee fashion house or being painted by a famous artist. And I wonder why she does that. Is it because the past was so much better than the present for her? If I had been a stunning model married to a glamorous rockstar and was now cooking for a living, I too would miss the past. But somehow I don’t think so. I think she is savvy. I think she knows people like me (and there were a lot then and a surprising number who still exist today) want to hear tidbits about what it was like to live that life and see pictures of it. Sometimes she repeats the pictures but I don’t mind. Sometimes there are pictures of their child who is now an adult, but I don’t think that’s a calculated gesture.
I thought about her as I made the salmon and I wondered if it would be better or worse to start out living a fabulous life and then end up as someone living an ordinary one. And I wondered if I were her if I would make my blog a repository of old memories. Every time I read her posts, I think, “I can’t believe you’re showing another picture from 25 years ago!” while simultaneously devouring it and knowing I wouldn’t be reading if she hadn’t. And so, maybe, it’s really me who shouldn’t be wallowing in the past. Too bad it’s so addictive.
By the way, she still looks great, and much more naturally beautiful than she was then. He has not aged as well.
Title comes from a song by a band I saw on that vacation in New Orleans.
Echo & The Bunnymen – Back of Love
Unrelatedly, I did just want to tell this story. When I was a freshman in high school, someone in my high school had a party and I wanted to go but felt like I didn’t have the right thing to wear. So on the night of, I told my mother that I changed my mind and wouldn’t go. She told me that when she was in high school, the same thing had happened, she didn’t go, and the next day everyone told her how great it was. She still remembered and wished she had gone. So I went. And had a great time. I remember very well dancing to this song. RIP Nick Ashford.
Ashford and Simpson – Solid
