My response to Michael Jackson’s death surprised me. I didn’t expect the tears to well, but they actually did. For me, Michael Jackson was more than his music; he was a touchstone for my adolescence.
I remember getting off the school bus in May of 1983 thinking that 8th grade was almost over, and that I was ready for high school. My good friend and I had our 14th birthdays two days apart, and he surprised me with the best gift ever—my first album, Michael Jackson’s, Thriller.
I had just gotten my braces off, and there was a sense of change in the air. Childhood was slipping away, and I thought being grown would start by being a “pretty young thing.” But the following summer was awkward. I was 15 in 1984 and had spent my first year as a scholarship kid at boarding school. I couldn’t return to my hometown and all my friends because my dad’s job had transferred while I was away in the 9th grade. So that summer I showed up to a new town trying to make new friends, knowing that I’d just leave again by Labor Day.
And I was growing up in other ways also. Every guy who looked at me was vetoed by my tightly wound Dad, who had his first heart attack that summer. At first I thought that monitoring his fourth teenager had sent Dad over the edge, but he later admitted that he had chest pains while going to the store to buy a pack of Camel unfiltered (he didn’t feel well enough to drive, but needed a smoke so bad he walked all the way there).
Then in the midst of my Dad’s chaos, my former next-door neighbor called. She was having her graduation party, couldn’t I get on the Greyhound and come? Remember when we used to play Charlie’s Angels? I always made her be Kate Jackson, while our other friend and I would fight to be Farrah. But I was too overwhelmed by being 15, by understanding that my Dad was mortal, and by loneliness; to accept her invitation. I turned to another album this time, Prince’s Purple Rain, to get me through.
So, when I realized tonight, that by the end of my 40 year old suburban dinner with three kids that today was the 25th anniversary release of Purple Rain, and that both Farah Fawcette and Michael Jackson had died, I had to stop and reflect. Poet Donald Justice wrote that “men at forty, learn to close softly, the doors to rooms they will not be coming back to.” Another door has closed today. I take a moment to remember, and then, I move on.
I guess this is what it sounds like, “when doves cry.”
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