"Still" & Spring Memories ~~ Back at the Dorm

Lionel Ritchie, The Commodores & STILL

The memory is 1980, the writing probably around 1990. Not really sure why I wrote about this song one evening. I was probably listening to it over and over, just as we so often did that Spring, and the memories swelled and I smiled.

Music takes you places. Some songs just carry you back to a place and time, to a moment, to a ritual, to a sacred place. It remains so vivid, that it seems like only yesterday, and that it is, still early, on one of those Spring evening, but reality makes it almost ten years past. Funny how that all works. 

Ellis had a high-powered “hifi” in their dorm room, in fact you could set the arm on the record player to continuously return to the same place on the LP over and over and over again. It was perfect, once we found our song. 

Geez, the memories, it represents all that was good about life, a sliver of time in our day and a second in our lives. Optimistic about our future, celebrating our freshman year in college, new friendships and good times yet to come, who knows why a song about love, inspired three young men, each setting their own course. 

If I recall we’d eat early that Spring, when the dining halls opened at 5 pm and the food on the cafeteria line looked a bit fresher. After dinner, we’d walk uphill heading back to the 3rd floor of our dorm and settle into Ellis and Victor’s room for one more short pause, before heading off to the library, labs or other places on the college campus. Victor always laid across his dorm bed, and Ellis would sit in his wooden rocker he’d travelled to school with, I would join them but just stand at the window and look out, reporting who was going where. The haze of dusk would be casting that intimate haze, shielding all that wasn’t perfect from our view and only highlighting what was the obvious beauty. We’d listen over and over while the rest of the campus scurried and settled into the fraternities and social clubs’ 6 pm dining hour. 

As we listened, it seemed like magic. Friendships immortalized by a moment, and a passing ritual as simple as a song. Over and over the melody would capture us. Taking each of us somewhere else in our minds, past, present, future. Who knows where each day our thoughts would wander. A joke interspersed, a paper waiting to be written, a smile from a co-ed discussed and a professor’s idiosyncrasy confirmed. We had just had enough to know we could master four years and triumph. We would confirm weekend plans, parties to attend, and girls to date. Whatever it was, it was all contained to a simple, repeating harmony. Working against the melody as the three of us listened, learned and shared our dreams. And just as quick as we’d settle in, after about six repeats, we’d jump up and head off to our lives. 

I remember how the moments seemed magical; embodying all that should be between anxious, yet confident freshman. It was our ritual for weeks, and now, today a memory when I listen to the music and the words… I’ve lost complete touch with these friends, but even today it transports me to that 3rd floor room and looking out that window… and somehow, magically I am propelled forward into believing you can conquer the world… 

“Mornings, just a moment away,… 

you laughed at me,… 

So many dreams that flew away,… 

lost but were quickly found,.. 

We played the games,…. 

We made our mistakes along the way,… 

but then most of all … STILL.”