Prompt: "A song that makes you think about something somebody said about that song, a while ago"
Selected by Joe
"Bennie and the Jets"
Elton John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, 1973
There's a grade school reunion that may or may not be happening for the Pres Class of '03. I told my VP, PoYB contributor and longtime friend Kristin, that she was going to have to be in charge (I just... I can't picture myself motivated for such a task, because if the stick is going to be planning this big event, then the carrot would normally be getting drunk at said event, and that's not happening anymore, so...), if this was going to happen. I don't know. I'm not invested either way.
But if it did happen, and people from my grade school class were much more motivated than I was to come out and support the class and catch up with people we haven't seen in twenty years, then yeah, there'd be some long-ago acquaintances that I'd be finding myself talking to from a long, long time ago.
There was this kid named Ben in my class, for instance. If I walked past him on the street today, I would not know it was him, so thoroughly has my image of my old sorta-friend been wiped from my memory. I can kind of picture him as a second grader, in my mind, but the picture is mad hazy. He lived about four blocks away from me, and so two blocks away from school. I remember Pres had the option that you could go home for lunch if you wanted to, and Ben was only one of two kids in my class who took the option. I always assumed this meant he was close to his parents, but what the fuck do I know? I didn't know anything then, and I probably know less now.
Anyway, my second grade teacher—whom I definitely can't picture in my mind, but I'm pretty sure she was young-ish relative to the other teachers, and I'm positive my sick mind right now would see a picture of her from 1996 and have the automatic thought of "she's hot"—must have been an Elton John fan, because at least once a day, after calling for attendance and saying the word "Ben," would follow up with "Buh-buh-buh-Bennie and the Jets!" This was long before I knew about music or about Elton John or about "Bennie and the Jets" or about the album that it's on or had an opinion that the album that it's on, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, is the best Elton John album by a mile. This was how the song was imprinted in my mind, and this is why I hear Ms. Adair every time I hear Elton John do the stuttering thing.
It was that same year that Ben's dad died. In second grade, around seven or eight years old, you don't know shit about what "death" even means. You can't grasp permanency like that. And if you're from a "traditional" two-parent-two-and-a-half-kids home, you definitely can't grasp the idea of losing a parent like that, the grief, the finality, the fucking atomic bomb it must be to your life, to lose a parent.
We spoke in hushed tones, not knowing how to behave. We knew something bad had happened, but we didn't know what or who or why. We just knew our classmate Ben was out of school for a week or more. I have very little memory of this time in my life, by the way, but one of the other few memories I do still have is a brief snippet of a conversation that Ms. Adair had with the class. This was the "let's talk about what happened" conversation. We were asked to share our feelings but what feelings could we possibly have? We were spoken to about what happens after you die, and I'm sure Ms. Adair's hands were tied in some respects, teaching at a Catholic school.
And I remember Ms. Adair publicly speculating that it was possible that Ben might possibly start crying, as in like when we're doing vocab words or math problems, that he might start openly weeping right there at his desk, and that maybe we as a class should have a plan if that happened. And I don't remember who exactly, but someone—a female classmate, someone who was already sitting next to Ben in the little clusters of desks—was assigned the herculean and frankly unimaginable task of gently guiding Ben out of the classroom and talking to him, were this moment of grief to suddenly wash over him in the middle of a second-grade lecture. Maybe this is just me not giving second graders enough credit in their emotional maturity, but man, I just can't in an universe imagine sitting next to a peer who is weeping and have any fucking clue what to do besides make it even more awkward (reminds me of "Carlos Is Crying" from the new Hold Steady album, but only one song per day for this project, Joe, damn it!!!).
A lot of this strikes me as random, that I have very few second grade memories, and the fact that two of them have to do with a kid named Ben who I didn't really hang out with and most likely never will again for the rest of my life unless Kristin is extremely on her shit this summer, and that that's probably coincidence more than those two memories having anything to do with each other besides occurring in the same academic year with the same small cast of characters. Still, I can't help but listen to "Bennie and the Jets" and think, even now, about the grief tangential to it, and how small I was, and how ill-equipped I was to even consider the idea—and maybe even still am.
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