Fairport Convention

I heard this song on my mix on Pandora today, and it's one of my favorites.  I couldn't remember when I first heard it, or first heard Fairport Convention, and then I remembered it was on Long Island in 1989 or 1990. I had gone there on student exchange my senior year in college, mistakenly believing it would be like Boston. When you're from the West, something that close on the map seems like it's just the same place.  I was wrong.

Anyhow, I was living in a group house with a woman who would become a dear friend, Leah, and a bunch of scientist PhD housemates.  I was dipping my toes in the gay and lesbian student group, where I had met Leah, ten years my senior and coming out after years of hiding and being born again.  We laughed a lot.

During one of the gay/lesbian mixers, I met a guy named Tony Morosco from SUNY New Paltz.  He and I had a flirtation in the way that I did in those virginal times.  He was Italian, and had a New York accent, with a little bit of a glottal stop on his t's, and he seemed so exotic and sexy. I visited him upstate but nothing happened; we were two blocks with each other as solid as those institutional walls of that drab campus where we met.  He was a sweet guy, but we weren't a match it seems. I wouldn't have even had an idea of what to do if the opportunity had presented itself. Instead, we both just spent an awkward weekend together.  I listened endlessly to folkish music, hung out with lesbians, and was as dark as those dark times were were living in.

I don't know why he came into my mind. It's possible he introduced me to Fairport Convention. It certainly feels like it could go with New Paltz and upstate New York.  I don't know if he did or not.  I do remember the ache of unrequited love, or lust, or puppy obsession.  It felt so insoluble, and so important.

Who knows where the time goes?