How Bad Luck Evokes Nostalgia Through Mix-tapes, Dancing and Dreaming

The recent string of bad luck I've been having has been unprecedented in my life in this particular way, until now. I won't go into it because, who really cares, but to add to the lengthy list of woes starting with a lost wallet, lost replacement driver's license, smashed side view mirror, broken down car while out of town, and etc., the air conditioner in my car that just broke down last weekend is out. I live in the South and it gets hot, especially in a black car, so, this morning I dropped her off to be looked at and hopefully fixed soon.

What that means is that I got to drive my old car, Vern, a 1998 Volvo, today. I love Vern. In Vern are some mix-tapes I've had since high school or possibly even late junior high school. Why yes, I'm showing my age.

On one of those gloriously mixed tapes if I do say so myself, is a collection of The Cure, Indigo Girls and the soundtrack to the movie Stealing Home, a cult classic mostly girls of my generation, I'd say, watched dozens of times in the early 1990's. To me this tape evokes the picture of long summer evenings, steam on the widows in the kitchen and how watching Mark Harmon as the washed up baseball player returning home for the funeral of his childhood-sitter and later, his first love, helped him to re-discover the part of him he'd thought he'd lost.

It's a great flick. I think it's interesting that I am just now remembering that the main character, Billy, has the last name Wyatt, which is what I named my second son.

And so, without further ado, here are two of my favorite songs from that soundtrack, which sometimes play in my old car from my old gloriously-mixed-if-I-do-say-so-myself tape.

Here is "And When She Danced":



And then, The Everly Brother's "All I Have To Do Is Dream", which I'd 100% seriously like to either cover or re-make one day, I like this song so much: