First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
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What essay is featured in this episode?
From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
So summer is coming soon. It's getting warmer. I'm spending more time outside. And just like every year when the weather gets like this, I find myself feeling nostalgic. For summer flings, for vacation romances, for first loves. It all makes me think about the modern love essay, What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love, by the writer Lisa Selin Davis. Thank you so much for having me.
It's a beautiful, sunshiny story, so this week we're bringing you that essay again. Plus, I talk with a few of my colleagues about the songs that taught them about love. This episode is a two-parter, so you'll want to look out for the second part next week. But I'll tell you about all that later. For now, here's What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love by Lisa Sellin Davis, read by Kristen Potter.
How did Lou Reed's music influence the author?
When Lou Reed died, I got on Facebook and found out just how many friends had chosen I'll Be Your Mirror as their wedding song. I wasn't one of them. But that song, more than any other, taught me about love. I listened to it endlessly the summer I was 16. My father had strongly suggested if I wanted to stay in his house for the summer as the divorce agreement had decreed, I should take a job doing hard physical labor in Saratoga Spa State Park in upstate New York. My father's idea was to heal me through hard work and the grounding power of nature. The job paid $3.35 an hour for digging trenches, building foot bridges, and learning about anger management and the medical uses of jewel weed, which grew wild along the creek. The work was torture. I was cut out for songwriting, not construction. But the worst part was riding my Fuji 12-speed there with a green hard hat on the rear rack while wearing ochre-colored work boots.
Boy, poison, I thought. I was disturbingly experienced. My older friends had introduced me to a variety of adult activities I shouldn't have known for years. But I'd never had actual sex, or an actual boyfriend, or been in love. And I wanted those things more than anything. After work one day, as I pulled my bike into our backyard, a boy was sitting there with my dad. My father was the local guitar teacher, and sometimes, gloriously stringy-haired rocker kids arrived at the house for lessons. This one wore beige shorts stained with bike grease, a yellow and blue striped rugby shirt, and very long red hair. The apogee of attractiveness. For me.
What was the author's first summer romance like?
I had seen him before at parties with my friends, and each time I had tried to get his attention the only way I knew, by speaking loudly about my stealing and drugs and temper tantrums, expounding on how depressed and in pain I was. I thought this would make me attractive by way of emotional depth, but he never seemed to notice me. This time he looked up, but I was desperate to hide. I went inside and stood at the screen door and watched as my father taught the beautiful boy the Travis style of finger-picking. After that, I daydreamed anxiously of the boy with the long red hair. At work, I wore scratchy work gloves and pulled tenacious weeds from the side of the creek bed, and every day I hoped to see him. But I feared it, too, lest he see me with my hard hat and work boots.
And then... One Saturday afternoon, when I wasn't working, I saw him leap into the water beneath the Hadley-Lazerne Bridge, the place where the Hudson and Sakandaga Rivers meet. It was a magical spot, with a rope swing and swirls of black water, where my friends and I spent lazy afternoons and played guitars on the rocks. He had pale freckles all over his chest and collarbone that formed a beautiful dent below his neck. He mumbled hello to me. I knew nothing about how to interest a boy, but I took off my non-work clothes, tank top and cut-off jeans, and went in the river in my bra and underwear. I played the full tablature of Neil Young's Needle and the Damage Done on the guitar. I put my body next to his as much as possible, standing close whenever I could. A few days later, the phone rang. My father answered, his face momentarily registering confusion as he handed the phone to me. The voice was so low and mumbly that I couldn't understand who it was or what he was saying, and that moment of intense awkwardness seemed interminable,
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What essay is featured in this episode?
0:01–1:37
2
How did Lou Reed's music influence the author?
1:37–4:06
3
What was the author's first summer romance like?
4:06–8:59
4
What awkward moments occurred during the author's first date?
8:59–12:09
5
How did the author find healing through love?
12:09–14:10
6
What lessons about love does the author share?
14:10–20:54