Light and Day

I hate driving. If this was a perfect town, we'd have public transportation that was reliable and clean. Clearly, that's never going to happen, so instead I rely on my kind-of-dying car to get me to and from every place I need to go. I've had so many incidents with my car, that it's only natural for me to fear it. The only time I actually enjoy driving is when the weather is nice, kind of how it was this past Sunday.

It was in the mid-seventies which is rare and fantastic, with a slight breeze. I was driving to a Borders which was around twenty five minutes away, so I had plenty of time to sit back, lower the windows, let the breeze flow through my car and listen to music. My iPod must have understood the mood because it instantly put on the song Light and Day by The Polyphonic Spree, one of my all time favorite songs. There's something about the song that's whimsical and inspirational. It makes me want to climb higher, run faster. It makes me want to be a child again, running, jumping and swinging on a cool autumn day with scratched knees and dirt under my fingernails, much like how the song Triplets of Bellville makes me feel like a flapper from the 1920's, singing into a microphone and holding a long, black cigarette holder.

It was spring break during my senior year of college. While most classmates were off on exotic beaches drinking and sleeping with people they'll forget about in the morning, I was in Tallahassee working. Thankfully, some of my friends were in town as well, so by day I sold books and by night I hung out. My friend Mike had gotten a new video camera to document circus practices and was determined to do something with it during the break. So one Saturday when a few of us had off, we decided to hang out at a playground nearby and just film us all having fun. Simple enough.

There were six of us there and I was the only girl. We climbed the trees, hung by our knees, jumped off the swings and shot water at one another using water guns. We explored the forest behind the park and climbed over large tree branches. We had to find alternate routes at times because my legs just weren't long enough to jump over the streams. We were campers, explorers. We didn't fear ticks or bugs, we just kept walking.We tumbled on the ground, played basketball and hackey sack and pretended that we were ten years old again. None of the previous problems we had (grades, money, relationships) mattered because they didn't exist anymore. We were back to a time when climbing trees was enough.

Hours later, we returned home. I went over to Mike and Jeff's apartment to look at the footage that he and I shot. It was shaky and amateur, nothing perfect, but somehow it held the essence of the day perfectly. Choosing the song "Light and Day," we proceeded to make a pieced together music video. One that showed that even twenty somethings could have good clean fun.

So now every time I hear that song it brings me back to that same breezy day where six friends were invincible. The video is here and to this day, it still makes me smile.