Nostalgic All Over

Investigator

What the hell am I doing?  Investigating the past.  I'm looking through my high school scrapbook, which is so intensely infested with dust mites that  I'm wearing the mask Jerry uses when he operates the leafblower.

Last night Scott Pelley announced on the Evening News that one of the Monkees, Davey Jones, had died.  In the background , "Daydream Believer," was playing,  and I had a nostalgic attack so severe I just about had to be taken to the ER.

It was 1967,  and I was wearing a baby-blue pleated skirt and matching cardigan sweater, which I bought at a shop in Town & Country Village.  It was rainy, and leaves were splayed on the sidewalk.  Nancy picked me up in her mother's lemon yellow Impala, and we drove to Del Mar High School.  Our skirts hit mid-knee, no shorter, or the old bat Mrs. Woodward would have called us in to the Dean of Girls, Georgina Somebody.  No pants, ever.  We were really, really good girls, mostly because we had no choice. 

The Scotch tape in my scrapbook has failed, and everything was loose and flopping around.  I was hoping I'd find the weekly KLIV radio station list of top rock songs with "Daydream Believer" on it. No luck.  I gave up and consulted Wikipedia:  The song was released in December 1967.  I was 17.  Did find a bunch of stuff that only another Del Mar-ite could appreciate:

Spirit ribbons and the school newspaper. We were "The Dons"

Stuffed all that back in the book, and downloaded the song from iTunes, along with--I kid you not--"I'm Into Something Good," (Herman's Hermits), "Glad All Over" (Dave Clark Five), and "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat?" (Herman, again).  I listened to them several times, and that may be it for years.  Catchy, but not a whole lot of substance.

And, by the way, Scott Pelley's one of us: born in 1957.