Baby Come Back

Here's some background noise for you to reminisce by with me--

I listen to Pandora a LOT these days.  I have created a couple of personal stations in which I have chosen the basic era of music and artists of my liking  This song, which I had not heard in a long long time, came on this afternoon.
I do love music from the 70's because it was my coming of age decade. The most drastic physical and life altering events happened to me in the seventies as I went from a teeny bopper 13-year-old in 1970, to being married and pregnant by 1978.

I got to really listen to music on my FM radio on the way to work because by 1978 Gary and I were living in our newly built house in Red Rock Estates just outside of Brandon  It sat on 1 square acre on which we, like everyone out there,  planted with hundreds of tiny Soil Conservation sticks that we hoped would survive the winter and eventually grow into trees.
The 12-15 miles Gary and I drove to and from our jobs each day enabled us to listen to cassettes or the radio. And because it was 'such a long distance' to drive, we got to listen to quite a few songs in their entirety.

The lyrics of most songs back then were about finding love, losing love, lost loves, making love(remember Afternoon Delight?) or giving up on love.  The words kind of went over my head though. I just sang along to the music not feeling much about the message of each song, but enjoying the melody and memorizing the words.  I'm quite sure that Gary never bothered to learn words to songs.  He listened to the radio non stop when he was working building houses, yet if I were to ask him if he remembered the words to a certain song 15 years later, he'd say, "I don't remember". Music was simply not important to him. Also, he routinely said, "I don't remember." to any question I asked him.  That was Gary.

Nowadays, music is important to me because I can listen and produce images I have not recalled in many many years.  This song played on the radio of my 1978 Brown Jeep CJ-7 hardtop.  That was a pretty nifty little machine which got about 13 mpg. When gas escalated out of reach at more than 79 cents a gallon, I decided enough was enough and the Jeep was sold after we got the blue Datsun 310 which more than doubled the Jeep's mpg. (Our cars and their mileage are also things I remember quite clearly)

Today when I heard, "Baby Come Back" I think it said to me what I wish I could say to Gary. I loved those years even though they were full of lots of work and change. We were making our life into what we wanted it to be.  We had a little boy on the way, we had good jobs and a big beautiful new house of our own.

If I could get my baby to come back, I would take him as he was in any of the nearly 4 decades we knew each other, but I think I'd like him best to come back as he was as a 50-year-old over the 22-year-old he was in 1978. Our life together had gotten only better and better.

There must be a reason why I remember details about all the passing years. I need them now more than ever to get me through the days alone.