Chapter 38: Different Perspectives

Friday, November 30, 1984

We were out of town as quickly as possible after classes, something we’d done more times this fall than I’d expected. Who knew there were going to be this many political rallies and concerts?

I suppose I should have guessed, but my memories were all tangled up with my freshman year at UT. I’d likely gone out of town no more than three or four times in my first semester, perhaps fewer. There had been no rallies, I hadn’t gone to any concerts in Houston, and I’d only gone to one or two away football games plus a trip or two home to see Mom and Dad.

This time we didn’t bother to stop anywhere, just grabbed fast food and headed straight to The Summit. Springsteen’s 1984 shows were already the stuff of legend and we didn’t want to miss a second of it.

We didn’t, either. We were in our seats well before the show started and still there, thrilled and half-exhausted, when it was over.

This was one of the shows where it felt like beer was not only called for but nearly required. Not a lot of beer, but we each had one.

The concert was, in a word, ‘incredible.’ I knew nearly every song, of course, and quite a few of them I’d never heard live. This time, the girls let me get away with saying this was my first time seeing Bruce live, and the only other time had been in 1987, without so much as suggesting a whapping was in order. It’d been nearly forty years for me, after all, and the memories of that other concert (one I might well attend!) were old and faded. In time, these memories would get old and fade, too.

‘Glory Days’ really touched all of us, I think, but Angie and me most of all. The others had been around us long enough to pick up some of our perspective on things, and we had glories aplenty to brag about. All of us were grounded enough to accept few people would ever particularly care about our having been national champions or about most of the other things we’d done.

Angie and Paige? They were legitimately part of history. It might be as a footnote to Lizzie and Janet, but they were also the couple which proved it was a rule and not a fluke, and that meant something to people far and wide.

‘Born To Run’ didn’t come out until the second song of the encore, which is always a good way of being sure there was still an encore to come. Once that was done, all bets were off. Bruce and the E Street Band rattled off several covers after that, and closed with what was, for me, a strange piece of forward-looking nostalgia: ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’.

That song had become a holiday staple. I’d heard it probably a hundred times, and many of them were when I was out with my former wife and our kids driving around and looking at Christmas decorations or otherwise enjoying the holidays. Right now, it was a new thing, and none of the others (not even Angie) had heard Bruce perform it before. For me, it was a very comfortable old friend come back around and new again.

It wasn’t one of those moments that had me suddenly crying or anything, but sharing this song and this moment with people who’d become family to me really meant something. I’d ‘known’ only two of them when I arrived in this universe four and a half-ish years ago, and even that was pretty tenuous. Angie was ‘my troubled cousin who I barely knew,’ and Mel was ‘Mark and Morty’s smarter, quieter sister.’

Now, we were family. Within a few years, I might well be legally related to Jas and Paige, and Cammie and Mel would (I hoped) always be in the innermost circle, part of our family of choice.

It was a magical evening, one we would hopefully always remember fondly, even as the memories faded and became more about the feeling and less about the specifics.

After the show, we hung out at our seats for a while. The parking garage was going to be a nightmare, after all. We all bought t-shirts on the way out. They’d be fun to wear to class, and we wanted souvenirs.

The parking garage was indeed a nightmare, and it was after one when we arrived at Mom and Dad’s house after dropping first Cammie, then Mel, off. There were no greetings with the Nguyens, nor any of the Rileys, and Mom and Dad were long asleep.

Perhaps they woke up when we came in, but we did our best to not disturb them and probably succeeded.

Jas and I got ready for bed quickly, then snuggled up.

She rested her head against me and said, “That was ... I’m so glad we did that!”

“Me, too, honey!”

She sighed and nuzzled against me a little more.

“This is ... these are our memories,” she said, putting a little kiss on my shoulder. “We’re going to bore our kids to death telling stories about things like this.”

“Probably,” I said, “though I hope our kids are the sort who’ll like Bruce themselves and maybe find out what this concert might have been like.”

“I hope so, too. And that we’ll like what they listen to.”

“Mostly, we probably will, if history repeats itself. There’s a whole range of music which was ‘popular with the kids’ that I never got into, though, so they’ll still have fun mocking us for being out of touch.”

“Should I ask?”

“Nah,” I said. “Let’s leave it for a surprise. It’ll be here soon enough.”

“I like that,” she said.

We kissed softly.

“I love you, Steve,” she said.

“I love you, Jasmine,” I said right back.

“Let’s get some sleep. Gotta watch the Aggies beat the hell out of t.u. tomorrow!”

“Yes, we do!”

“Do you have mixed feelings about that? At all? I mean, I know you actually kinda expect that, but ... given how things were?”

“Nah,” I said. “I have memories of being at the game and being seriously disappointed at the time, but they blur into memories of being disappointed with UT football during my entire college life there. I’m committed to this life and these memories, now, ones where I’ll maybe think positive thoughts for UT when they’re playing most other teams but where I’ll 100% support the Aggies in beating the hell outta t.u. anytime, anywhere.”

She giggled and hugged me.

“Good,” she said. “I particularly like the middle part of that!”

“Me, too, honey,” I said. “Me, too!”

Saturday, December 1, 1984

Breakfast came a bit early for all of us, even with sleeping in a bit. We’d been out late, after all. While the A&M/t.u. game was a night game, we still needed to drive to Austin, get checked into our motel, have dinner, then get to the game. Parking at UT for football games is notoriously difficult.

I’d gotten used to the 1984 version of the roads between Houston and Austin by this point. They were still definitely lacking a lot compared to what they would become, but that was fine. We enjoyed the drive. A lot of it was spent with the cassette player blasting out Bruce Springsteen songs as we all sang along.

For reasons of pure nostalgia, we were staying at the Howard Johnson we’d stayed at during a couple of Debate / Drama trips, back in the day. Jas, Angie, Paige, and I had stayed here while college hunting, too. I’d stayed here with Mom and Dad in the 1970s (twice, if you counted things the right way), and had stayed here in the 1990s and 2000s for reasons that would almost certainly never happen in this life.

It had a great pool (which we definitely wouldn’t use on this trip) and the classic sort of Howard Johnson restaurant. Other than that, it was somewhat of a dump — but it was a dump that meant something, and that was enough.

Gene had climbed between hotel balconies there, not long ago but a universe away. I’d slept in a bathtub there, too, perhaps on that same trip.

As we’d said last night, we were making our own memories now. Some of the old ones would always matter, though, if only to me.

We only stayed at the motel long enough to check in, get our bags put away, and call Mark, Morty, and Emily. Once that was done, we headed off to dinner.

I was still having to readjust to 1984 Austin. In 2021 it would have been pretty easy to find a restaurant even on Texas - Texas A&M weekend (if there was still such a thing — by 2021 there was not). It was a much tougher problem in 1984 simply because there were so many fewer restaurants.

We wound up at a place I hadn’t been in a very long time by almost every measure save one. For me, it was almost forty years. This ‘me’ had never been there.

However, first-life me had been here only about a year ago. We’d been in Austin for a Debate trip (one we hadn’t gone on this time). The restaurant was memorable because my Debate partner at the time (who’d never signed up for Debate in this universe — for all I knew, he didn’t exist) ordered a margarita. He was underage, and I had no idea how he thought he would get away with it, but he did it anyway.

Meg came by the table just as the waiter was coming out. The waiter figured out the issue and simply bypassed the table, thankfully. Meg never knew, and the waiter got a great tip.

The girls all enjoyed the story so much they didn’t even threaten to whap me over talking about my ‘previous trip’ to a place I’d ‘never been before.’

We headed to downtown Austin once we’d finished with dinner. This might be one of the few times we’d consider ‘hitting the bars’ after a game, so I parked in a garage in between Austin’s famous Sixth Street bar area and the UT campus. It’d be a fairly long walk in either direction, but no farther than the walk between Chemistry class and our house.

The best part of that area was easy-to-find parking. The closer we got to campus the worse it would be, and we might spend as long or longer finding parking as it would take to walk.

Another case of ‘old Steve’ versus ‘new Steve.’ I could remember times in my life when this walk would have been daunting. I’d been quite overweight and had arthritic knees that really slowed me down sometimes. Now, on the other hand, I was young and in better shape than I’d ever been in my first life. A bit of a walk would be fine.

The A&M / t.u. game is one of those where it really doesn’t matter how good the teams are. If both schools had been 0-10, the stadium would still have been packed. If just one had been, and the outcome was essentially a foregone conclusion, it would likely have still been a sellout.

As it was, there was a lot riding on this game. t.u. was coming into the game 7-2-1 overall, 5-2 in conference. Perhaps more importantly, they felt they had something to prove. They’d been ranked #1 for two weeks earlier in the season. The tie with Oklahoma had stung, but it was the losses to Houston and Baylor (both by wider margins than A&M’s losses to those teams) which really stung.