The Summer of '77: Fleetwood Mac, Roosevelt Stadium & Jimmy from Jersey City

This post and all the laughter and fun it brought up in me (and perhaps in you as well) was inspired by my friends with the Scintilla Project, a fortnight of prompts so you will become a more talented storyteller while being involved in a phenomenal community of other storytellers. There is still time to join the creative souls with the Scintilla Project. Simply click here.

Does your memory do this, too?

A doorbell to your past rings and you are swept up in a long ago moment you hadn’t remembered the day before or even the month or even years before. That’s how it happened for me.

It was an early-ish morning, meaning the children were tucked away in school and I was free to do my many theater chores. I was producing Steel Magnolia’s at the time and for reasons my memory is fuzzy on, I was at Hancock’s Fabric in its old location. It once lived in a run-down shopping center that was, for the most part deserted. Now it is even more deserted.

Roosevelt Stadium Circa 1977 when the Indians Played. Its condos now. It strikes me now as how nebulous many of the details are: I can’t remember precisely what car I was driving at the time, I can’t remember my exact purpose for being at the fabric store, I just remember hearing Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” because in that instant I was transported from my car in the early part of this millennium to the Summer of 1997 at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. I was waiting for a Jersey City Indians AA Minor League game to start with my friend, Madeleine at my side and a quirky guy named Jimmy who was from Jersey City leaning over the bleachers beside us.

He was singing along with Fleetwood Mac in his scratchy, very New Jersey accent, “It’ll be here, better than before, yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone…. Ohhhhhh, don’t you look back.”

This is Kris Yoder, the player I had a serious fifteen-year-old crush on. Ha ha ha. I never knew he made it to "The Show" with the Braves! I have the kind of memory that does that: when I am not expecting it I evaporate from the present and find myself plunked down at a different place, in a different time, and the me now is living in the body of the me of whatever date and time I have landed within. It is the wiser, older, less cute and heavier me arriving inside the form I wore at fifteen-year-old when I had an active crush on one of the players and was entertained by the other people who wound up at Roosevelt Stadium along with me: friends and strangers for the moment as well.

There was the cop, the requisite accent included, who asked “Where do you lovely young ladies live?” and when we answered, “Glen Ridge.” He said, “Where? I don’t know where that is but it must be God’s country.”

Do you recognize Tom Cruise here in the short oh so short cut off jeans? Pretty funny.... He would know who Tom Mapother was, but Tom moved to Glen Ridge that summer and before high school had ended, he had become Tom Cruise and appeared as in Brooke Shield’s Endless Love playing her brother, Billy. Ian Ziering of the original 90210 was in the film, too, with a higher billing than Tom. Irony lives and breathes in the credits of old movies. I believe Tom had started filming Taps as well, but I could have the timing wrong because Tom and I were like ships in the night. He moved into God’s country right when I moved out.

Nonetheless, the cop made me smile and Jimmy made me smile more. He was a skinny boy, a year younger than Madeleine and me and he was always happy to see us. I never even thought of crushing on the fourteen-year-old peer of mine.His voice singing the then ubiquitous Fleetwood Mac song was just icing on the cake. I can still hear it. I hear it now, the smiling voice of Jimmy from Jersey City.

I was happy then. Life was simple. I knew every day I would sit at a big table in the cafeteria with nine of my closest friends. As I write this more than thirty-five years later, my daughter who now attends Smith College in Massachusetts is on her way to spend Spring Break with one of those nine girls who is now a lawyer living in Maine.

I don’t know how long I sat there, in my car, while actually within the confines of Roosevelt Stadium in the Summer of 1977, but it brought me a deep level of contentment. Even in the rewriting of the moment those feelings return. My belly goes soft and my mouth settles into a sigh-filled smile.

Kris and Jimmy, where are you now? I'm sitting in an almond orchard in Bakersfield, California. This post was inspired by the folks at Scintilla13 - Here's what they have to tell us:

We believe that who we are is informed by our stories. Here, we want to offer you a space to introduce yourself, and a guide to share your history and make some connections along the way. We’ll be offering daily prompts for two weeks beginning on March 13th.

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