In the Groove. Again.
The first warm spring day is my hands-down favorite of the year.
That’s what it was the day before yesterday. I’d planned on taking my car in for an oil change and inspection, but couldn’t bear the thought of waiting in the Subaru dealership watching cable news for an hour and a half.
Instead, I opened windows. I walked Charlie at least five times. I stood transfixed in the yard, listening to birds and distant motorcycles.
The neighborhood filled with folks walking dogs or teaching kids how to ride their bikes without training wheels. Shouted pleasantries (i.e., “can you believe this weather?”) uncustomary in Connecticut, a.k.a. The Standoffish State, were suddenly ubiquitous.
As I stood at the end of my driveway dappled in sunlight a Simon and Garfunkel song I was once obsessed with, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” came into my head. I would listen to it while dancing around our wall-to-wall carpeted living room, opening the walnut stereo, placing the needle down at the song’s beginning the instant it faded out, again and again and again, validating Pavlov, my conditioned response, euphoria.
The last line of the song ends with “all is groovy” -a vernacular that did not outlive its moment- but the words that precede it, “Life, I love you” endure. I felt those words and the sincerity of feeling not as echo, but immediacy, like that needle placed in the groove to flare up again, happiness made somehow sweeter for the certainty of joy.