Lee recommends “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton
Driving on this warm spring day with the windows down, I'm seventeen again. It's early Friday evening, my mom has let me have the car, and Ginny, Brenda, and I are on our way to pick up Kerry. When Minnie Riperton's "Lovin' You" comes on the radio, we turn it full volume and join our questionable singing voices with her gloriously soaring soprano. The air, thick with the fragrance of lilacs and honeysuckle, is the perfect accompaniment for singing about intoxicating love.
We're headed to the Wagon Wheel for our girls' pizza night. There, the menu item “wing dings” will strike us as hilarious and we'll laugh so hard we’ll cry. Then Brenda will absentmindedly poke her finger in a hole of the knotty pine paneling and the lamp above our table will immediately go out, so we'll laugh even harder. Finally, we'll see our waitress has hastily scribbled down our drink orders as 2 "Spit" and 2 "Pespi," and we will convulse. We will vow to pronounce Sprite and Pepsi this way forevermore.
Words about loss, grief, and mourning have not entered our vocabulary yet. We know only the hope and promise of youth. Our futures are completely unscripted, but we envision them as nothing short of bright and shining, full of the love, success, and happiness we are anxious to grab hold of as we cross the threshold to adulthood. But not tonight. Tonight is all about now. Tonight is for pizza, music, and the silly giggle fits of girlhood. Just before it’s time to go, I put a quarter in the restaurant jukebox and we sing our “Lovin’ You” anthem one more time.
I love my husband and the life we share, our kids and grandkids, beyond measure, but, oh, seventeen was something.
Lee Gaitan is an award-winning author of four books, including the Amazon #1 Bestseller My Pineapples Went to Houston, First Edition, and Lite Whines and Laughter, which garnered three international book awards, and for which she was named a First Place Winner for Georgia Independent Author of the Year. The second edition of My Pineapples Went to Houston won a Mediacrest Award, a Literary Titan Award, and was named a Best Book Award Finalist, American Writing Award Finalist, as well as a Book Excellence winner. Lee’s blog entries have earned wins from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and she was a winner in the national Nickie’s Prize Writing Competition.
Lee has also authored chapters in several bestselling anthologies and her work has been featured on The Huffington Post, Erma Bombeck Humor Writers’ Workshop, The Good Men Project, Mothers Always Write, Enchanted Conversations, and Bella Grace among others.
Visit her website at leegaitan.com.
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