Deja Vu All Over Again

I used this for the blog exchange last week. I thought it was excellent, but it was not nominated for a best of Blog Exchange Award. C'est la vie. I'm re-posting it here because I think it has some great lines in it.

I love tunes from the '50s and '60. When I was in junior high school, my aunt acknowledged my enthusiasm for the music she enjoyed at my age, and she entrusted me with her collection of 45s. It was chock full of amazing Elvis and Beatles tunes, as well as great one hit wonders like Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las and My Boyfriend’s Back by The Angels, which I particularly loved. My adoration of my records did not mean that I cared for them responsibly, however.

Instead of keeping them safe in the awesome early ‘60s carrying case that my aunt gave the records to me in, I left them scattered about my room. One evening, I was playing with my pet chameleon (Sir Green Bean), and he ran under my metal bookcase. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I thought, panicking. Instead of taking any books off the unit before I tried to lift it, I just grabbed it. In slo mo, I watched in horror as several Encyclopedia Brittanicas soared through the air, headed directly for a fragile record I carelessly left on the floor. “Nooooooo!” I screamed as My Boyfriend’s Back cracked under the weight of knowledge.

Several years later when I was in high school, I recounted the sad tale to a friend during a break in our biology class. “Yeah, it was so sad,” I said. “I broke My Boyfriend’s Back with some encyclopedias.”

The cute guy sitting in front of us (who I had a raging crush on) turned around. “What!?!? You broke your boyfriend’s back?” he asked, his eyes wide with horror.

“Yeah, but don’t worry. The edges of the crack line up, so it still works,” I responded calmly, mistaking his concern for a nonexistent person with anxiety about a crappy record.

Eventually, we cleared up the misunderstanding, and realizing that I was not a threat to anyone’s well-being, we started dating. A few months later, he lost interest and dumped me. I may have broken My Boyfriend’s Back, but my first boyfriend broke my heart.