I hear
this song and I’m back in Tom W’s room at Blackburn, 1975, marveling at the
intricate acapella harmonies at the start, flowing into, after some whale and
other sounds of the sea, an early ecological plea to stop harvesting the whale
“…just to feed the pets we raise, put the flowers in your vase, and make the
lipstick for your face.”
Reminds
me of how much of our time at BU, at least what I can recall of it, consisted
of wasting our time, listening to albums in Tom and Wes’s room, since Tom had
the best stereo set-up at the time, i.e. Marantz Tuner/Amp, Bose speakers,
Advent turntable.
I can
honestly say there are whole chunks of my time spent in classrooms that I have
zero memory of. Yet I can recall Hoc-Soc and IM basketball games (# 5- God’sSong) with a clarity that is startling.
In late
1975 I attempted to go back to my hard contact lenses, as I was getting tired
of my John Lennon wire rims. However, I failed to build up wear time gradually
(as was required with hard lenses, you’d start with 4 hours, then after several
days build up to 8 hours, then to all day) and kept them in too long on a
Friday evening.
I woke
up about 3 AM with a feeling like someone was squirting an orange peel into my eyes;
they were inflamed and tearing up like crazy. I could barely see, but I still
drove myself to the Carlinville Hospital, which was several blocks away, which
did not have an emergency room at the time. They rinsed my eyes out with a
syringe, and then put me in a dark room.
After
several hours they let me go and sent me to an ophthalmologist, who informed me
that I had corneal abrasions. He gave me some eye drops and some dark glasses
that clipped over my wire rims, giving me the look of a blind person (think
Ralphie, in A Christmas Story after his “Soap….. Poisoning!!”) for
several days.
I went
back to contacts several years later, when gas permeable soft lenses came on
the market. I finally gave up on all contacts in my 40’s and I’ve worn glasses
ever since.
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