Once

The tagline for the film Once is "How often do you find the right person?"

I saw the movie with the bibliophile tonight, and while it wasn't the best movie ever, it was very good. I'm a complete sucker for movies about the love of music. Not musicals, per se, but movies about musical people. I often wish I was more musical than I am. I started piano lessons when I was seven, and while I got very good at playing beautiful pieces from my books, I've never been able to create music of my own or follow along well enough to jam with someone else. Of everything music-related, I think that's what I'd most like to do, given the choice of one musical miracle. (I used to say I'd love to be the lead singer of a touring rock band, but I think just being able to do sessions would be good enough).

Oddly, I did get to experience one magical summer of being in a musical sort of environment / synergy. I was friends with a girl who wanted to be a singer-songwriter, and the summer after our freshman year at college, she and another girl we'd gone to high school with recorded a CD together in a mutual friend's bedroom. I don't remember exactly how this happened, but I ended up singing backup vocals on one track of the CD, even though I'm really not a very good singer. I got out the CD for the first time in years after returning from the theater tonight, just because it had been a long time since I'd listened to it, and I was hoping it would take me back to the way it felt to be so young and earnest and willing to put belief in music.

Then, the music started to remind me of just how weird and fortuitous that part of my life really was, and how fitting it is to remember all of this in conjunction with a movie that asks "How often do you find the right person? Once." I was just going to write about how cute the movie was, but then things started to get sort of tangential.

The singer-songwriter, H, went on a roadtrip with me and my cousin MacGyver (Danger's husband) during the summer of 2000. There's really nothing like two weeks in the back of a Suburban, traveling across twelve states, to spark something special, if sometimes short-lived. When we got back home, H and I continued to hang out. There are two main universities in my hometown. I went to Public University, and H went to Private University. She started inviting me to parties with her large and varied group of college friends, and it was really an incredible summer. These were the kind of parties I always wanted to go to, the kind I hope to someday go to again--people talking about anything and everything, where enthusing about your favorite author and passing books around were just as welcome as people sharing beers from the fridge. It wasn't fated for me to stay close to any of those people, really, and I only really know where one couple is these days. Transients through my life, save one. One, the only one, the right one.

One of H's college friends, D, worked at the local ToysRUs. When MB moved up here from Kentucky, he got a job at TRU. He didn't know anyone, so D invited him to hang out with her friends. H's friends.

H and the other singer chick, M, used to play their songs at this short-lived vegetarian cafe downtown on Mondays. I always had to work on Mondays. Except then one Monday, August 7th, I didn't. Danger and I met up and went to the cafe to see H and M play. I remember that I was wearing army-green pants and a polo shirt I'd bought at the Goodwill. I remember that it was drizzling, but I didn't have an umbrella. I remember how nervous I was that I'd agreed to sing backup vocals on that one song at the cafe. In front of people.

I remember sitting at the table, talking to these amazingly cool people who were, however briefly, my friends. I remember hearing one of them say, "Oh, there's MB and his brother," and me thinking that at last I'd get to meet MB, the only unknown member of this oddball consortium of people. I turned around and saw him, and I won't say it was love at first sight, but I can swear to you that I thought, "Huh. Well. Hey." or something. I was interested. Suddenly, intensely, inexplicably interested. I tried very hard to make conversation with him. I was bizarrely relieved when I found out he wasn't returning to Kentucky once the summer ended. I left the cafe knowing that I wanted to see him again.

After that, I semi-stalked him at every party we were at together. I always made an effort to be friendly, and always tracked him down to talk to him. There's a lot more to it, but it comes down to this:  after that, there was nothing else, no one else. That was seven years ago, and there never has been anyone, anything else.

Halfway through the film, I started to think about how blessedly ridiculously blindly damn lucky I am to have found MB, and now that I've recalled all the magic of that summer, it seems like the universe really did line up, just briefly, just for a heartbeat, just for one slow summer, just long enough to give me a chance to meet that right person. And once was all it took.