August, Track 10: Satellite Call

The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings are more focused on the songs than others. Today, we’re onto Track 10.

Side A

1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey

Side B

6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale

If you use Apple Music, a good friend and reader has put together a playlist of Tracks 2 through 11 here.

***

There are two main roads leading south out of Crystal Lake. Route 31 runs down from the east part of town, by Around the Clock and the YMCA, cutting through the older areas of our patch of suburbs, nearer the Fox River. Randall Road pulls out from the western part, by South High School and the sewage plant, passing cornfields that have rapidly transformed to strip malls.

I’m hesitant sometimes to write about him. I’ve written about him once before on here. I wasn’t close with him, and there’s an element to that which makes his not my story to tell. But this isn’t really his story. It’s my story—my story of him.

It was the beginning of summer, and my old high school’s baseball team had been knocked out in Regionals, losing in the first round yet again, this time to South, 2-1. I was in town before heading back to South Bend for summer classes, and Coach had texted a few former players to come to the end-of-year dinner down at Nick’s Pizza. With some time to kill—an errand hadn’t taken as long as planned—I did a lap around the southern part of town.

For a long time, I didn’t know where Randall Road led once it passed McHenry Avenue on its way into the city. I always turned off on McHenry, or on Ackman before it. I’d never really thought about it, but that day, I decided to find out, following it to learn it simply curved to the east and became Rakow Road for a little more than a mile before t-ing into 31. After nineteen years, that hole in my internal map of my hometown was filled.

It was early evening, and the sun was high in the sky as I rolled around in a little figure eight: 31 to Rakow to Randall to Miller to Golf Course to Ackman to Randall to Rakow to Pyott to Main to 14 to 31. I drove it maybe twice, then it was time for the dinner, and I pulled into Nick’s Pizza.

He was at that dinner, back for his own summer baseball and for helping with the high school’s summer baseball. He was playing at a college over near the Indiana/Ohio and Indiana/Michigan lines. A year younger than me, he’d just finished his freshman season. He’d recently lost his mother.

I didn’t know him well. We’d played against each other in Little League, then against each other in travel ball, then as teammates for a tournament in the Caribbean when we were fifteen and again as teammates my senior year. He played second base that season. The IHSA had switched bat restrictions, right around when the NCAA did, and as a consequence of the smaller sweet spot, our place in the small-school division in the conference, and hitters tending to swing a bit ahead of my cutter, he turned a lot of double plays for me. It was easy. A runner was on first, the ball was hit towards him or the shortstop, and every time, nearly without fail, they got two outs.

He was a smart kid. Great ACT score. One of the best on the team. He was witty, and he had an ironic sense of humor, and his smile had an edge to it, like he was always waiting to pounce on a joke.

Maybe it’s just how the memories warp over time. But that night, at the pizza place, he still had the smile. His eyes, though. They looked a little different behind it. More uncertain. More desperate.

His funeral was right before college classes started back up. Some of his friends’ classes had already started back up, and they drove back for it, one all the way from Tuscaloosa. It was packed in there that night. Packed. And it hurt, and I can’t imagine how much it hurt those who knew him a lot better than me.

I struggled to explain to Emma over the phone those nights why it was affecting me so much. One thing I didn’t say, but floated into my mind, was that I’d been afraid, and I was still afraid. I’d been afraid it would be me. I was afraid it would be me, one day.

It was early evening, and the sun was beginning to set as I rolled towards the bowling alley. There was a night or two left before I’d go back to Indiana, but this was the goodbye night. We were all filtering out of town. Of the others I was meeting, only one knew him, I think. I was alone in the car. It was a few days after the funeral.

I needed a minute before getting to the bowling alley, so I drove a loop again. Ackman to Randall. Randall to Rakow. Rakow to 31, then somehow turning around and heading back towards Randall, back towards the strip malls, back towards the bowling alley.

The Blessed Unrest had come out a year earlier, and Emma and I’d gone to see Sara Bareilles on tour at the Chicago Theatre in the middle of that summer. It was still a time of iTunes and burned CD’s for me, and I had the album in the car, looping through as I drove wherever I needed to drive. In this case, to the bowling alley. The fifth track came on, and I listened, and then I put it on again. And then I put it on again. And then I put it on again, and again, and again. And I drove, and the sky was orange, and he was dead. And I wished so badly that he wasn’t.