It’s a heartache
Nothing but a heartache
Hits you when it’s too late
Hits you when you’re down
— Lyrics from It’s a Heartache by Bonnie Tyler
The building had a generic beach name like the Sands or the Ocean Terrace or the Tide Pool. The exterior first floor lined the boardwalk and offered the same storefronts as the rest of the three-mile strip—t-shirt shop, cheap fried food, bar with a vertical sliding wall that could be lifted open for an outdoor feel, t-shirt shop, and so on. The building broadcast a local pop station onto the beach all day. As Bonnie Tyler’s It’s a Heartache blasted above the umbrellas for the thirty-eighth time that day, my mom blurted out, “I love this song. This is my favorite song.”
Prior to this, the only music my mother ever showed any interest in was what used to be called elevator music—bland, treacly orchestral renditions of familiar pop songs like the Beatles’ Penny Lane and the Carpenters’ Top of the World. It was designed to fade into the background and offend no one. This music played in fast food restaurants, grocery stores, and of course elevators. The Washington, DC radio dial included an easy listening station called WGAY. It was named in the fifties, before “gay” became a pejorative for, well, gays, and was then reclaimed by gay people as an identifier. WGAY played elevator music twenty-four-seven. Their advertising department termed it beautiful music.
When I say my mother liked elevator music, what I think I mean is she liked having music playing, but not music she ever needed to think about it. All it did was fill the room like an air freshener. Pleasant, but easy to overlook. It was the only music played in my parents’ cars. For my mom to express love for what I considered a pretty good pop song shocked me.
This trip, at age forty-three, was my mother’s last cancer-free vacation. Early the next year, she had a double mastectomy, and then five years of chemotherapy and radiation. In 1984, only forty-nine years old, she died. It’s a Heartache is the one and only song I associate with my mother.
My Monday night spin class transported me back to 1978. In a warm, humid exercise room, the facility A/C unable to compete with the daily temperatures reaching the high nineties, six or seven of us grinded our pedals in time with the music. Me, unlike everyone else, grew a small lake of sweat on the floor beneath my handlebars, my hyper-efficient cooling system running on overdrive. Near the end of a hard rocking mix including Thunderstruck, Sweet Child O’ Mine and Smells Like Teen Spirit, Debbie, the instructor, threw in It’s a Heartache. For the first time during that hour, I stopped focusing on form, leg speed and leverage and just thought about my mom.
A few weeks ago, my daughter Sophie sent me a text: Do you think I look like your mother? Because I do. I’m not sure what photo she was looking at, or why she would even have a photo with her in Montana of a woman who died eighteen years before she was born. I don’t really think Sophie looks much like my mom, except in the eyes; Sophie and I have similar and distinctive eyes. But I’m happy my daughter is thinking about my mother, thinking about her heritage and those who came before her. Because she died forty years ago, I rarely think about my mom anymore. I’m grateful she popped into my life this week.
More stories about my mother:
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
