“Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac, Wednesday, June 23, 2021
WE CAN CALL IT ANOTHER LONELY DAY. I don't have much memory of this song when I was growing up. Released 10 years before I was born, it would have been played on classic rock stations, but even when my mom started listening to classic rock in the car, I don't remember hearing this song. However, I do remember both my mom and dad changed the channel whenever Fleetwood Mac came on the radio. They said they heard too much of this album back in the late '70s. My mom's friend listened to it on repeat, so she had heard it enough for a lifetime. My first memory of this song is from the Forest Gump soundtrack. But the memory of this song is about a trip to Florida in mid-July 2012. I was going down to Florida by myself for the first time. I was going to stay with my grandfather and visit my friends. River was getting married, and it was a kind of a college reunion of a lot of my friends. My college was fed by many Adventist high schools, and many of my friends had graduated from the Adventist high school in Orlando, which coincidentally was my mom's hometown. Several occasions over summer vacation I visited my Orlando friends, and this would be the last of these trips before going to Korea.
IF I COULD, MAYBE I'D GIVE YOU MY WORLD. Besides River who was marrying another Orlando Adventist High School graduate who was not as close friend, my two best friends in Florida were Jim, my best friend from college and Mark, my roommate for a semester until he transferred to UCF on a much better scholarship. Jim had been my suite-mate for about a year and a half before he graduated, about a year before me. Whenever I visited them they always met up with other friends, and I felt like I was part of their group--a feeling I never really had. It made me feel like I was in some sort of alternate reality where I could have grown up with friends rather than being the kid who had grown out of church but was still dragged there every Saturday while the boys I grew up with stopped coming and we all grew apart. Saturday night before the wedding the next day I hung out with Jim and Mark and some others. They were playing Guitar Hero: World Tour. I tried to play a few songs, but got frustrated at the rhythm game that had nothing to do with playing a guitar. So I just watched them. Jim on vocals, Mark on guitar, another guy on drums, another guy on bass. One of the songs they played that night was "Go Your Own Way."
TELL ME WHY EVERYTHING TURNED AROUND. Sunday night Jim and I went to see The Dark Knight Rises, and he announced that he was moving to Dallas to work for the Adventist conference. I was in the final stages of my paperwork for Korea. I had come to the end of my "spiritual journey" at Adventist university, and the results were not all that I thought they would be. Nothing big had happened. River had published a book about the missionary murdered in Yap. My other friends were getting great jobs at Adventist schools around the country. After River's wedding there was a list of other friends' weddings. No prospects of a girlfriend for me, but it seemed like finding a group of friends was good enough. But these friendships confused me--girls I felt no romantic feelings attraction towards and guys that I felt like I had never felt before with. There was always something about Jim and Mark that I wanted to spend more time with them, but never could have enough time. And the time we spent together it felt like it was just killing time until we had to do the next thing like write a paper or meet other people. I didn't want things to end. It took me my whole life to find friendships like this. But college was over and life was pulling us away. I was never the boy who grew up in Central Florida. Mark and Jim and River's stories aren't mine. I am Tyler from New York and North Carolina and Korea. You? You can go your own way.
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