When I was in high school, I followed around a semi-local-to-me band called Lightheaded. Lightheaded was a Christian rock band, made up of three brothers and two of their friends. They wore plain white t-shirts and baggy jeans. They shaped their hair with gel. They sang edgy lyrics like, “Go ahead and squeeze me, out comes Jesus Juice/ I got a lot inside so I can take the abuse.” You know, that sort of grunge that just drives the girls crazy.
The band accumulated a small following, mostly made up of teenage girls and their mothers, who were their drivers. We girls met up at shows and in the chatroom on Lightheaded’s website—and we feigned excitement when someone else got chosen as “Fan of the Month” in the band’s printed-and-mailed monthly newsletter.
My love for this band is almost too embarrassing to spell out, but I’m going to have to spell it out so that you can appreciate the crescendo of this story with me. My fandom included doing things like freeze-framing music videos that the guys posted on their website, printing them out frame by frame, and then creating a flip-book in my journal. That was actually some pretty impressive commitment—Fan of the Month commitment, might I humbly suggest—but it is a little embarrassing to think about now. I guess if my mom refused to drop her whole life one weekend to drive me to a concert, I could always sit in my room and watch the silent film that I had created.
Lightheaded mostly played in cities that were an hour or more drive from my hometown of Murray, but my parents often gave into my pleading and drove me to concerts. Often, but not always. Sometimes I had to pine. But one day I tore open their monthly newsletter, and would you believe it: on my 15th birthday—glory, hallelujah—Lightheaded was to play a concert in the basement of a church in Murray, Kentucky. I used my finger to trace the invisible line between the date and the location, worried that I was creating some sort of optical illusion with my hopes and dreams. They seemed to still be matching on both the tenth and twentieth time I traced my finger back and forth, but the serendipity was almost too much for that little 14-year-old heart to believe. I started planning the party anyway.
On the day I turned 15, after pizza and cake at my house, a friend drove our party bus to First Baptist Church in downtown Murray, Kentucky. These friends all knew about Lightheaded, of course. It was impossible to be my friend and to not know about Lightheaded. A few of these friends had been to concerts with me; One or two had seen the flip-book. But none of them were in the running for Fan of the Month, so they were all safe to bring along. (And as I look back, wow—really, really good friends.)
We came down the stairs into a multi-purpose room—a large open space with tile flooring, drop ceiling, and all of the chairs stacked and pushed against the wall. The guys of Lightheaded were set up in one corner of the room, not on risers or anything, level with the rest of us and just a little obscured by a couple of inconvenient columns. There was no obvious space for the audience to stand except to stand right in front of them. I waved nervously to the guys and they waved back to me. They all knew me by name, even though they had yet to print my name in their monthly newsletter.
A few more people trickled in, but not many. There were so few of us that when the concert started, the entire audience was able to make a single-line semicircle around the band. If we were given one of those colorful parachutes with handles, like the ones we played with in P.E. class, we could have all grabbed a piece of it, and had handles to spare. That didn’t matter to me; I was going to sing every word to every song, whether there were ten of us or a thousand of us. And that night I was going to do it at eye-level, nearly nose-to-nose with them.
In the middle of the concert, my friend Wes cleared his throat to get the attention of Dustin, who was Lightheaded’s lead singer and the oldest of the three brothers. In my memory, Wes tapped Dustin on the shoulder, which is so funny because he wouldn’t have even left his spot in the audience to do it.
“It’s Libby’s birthday today,” Wes said.
“It’s Libby’s birthday!” Dustin repeated into the microphone. That would have been enough for me. That was enough to leave me wide-eyed and floating.
But sometimes when you think you have hit the crescendo, you learn it is only still growing: Dustin asked if I would join him on stage. Of course, this only meant that I walked a few steps forward, and then turned to face the semi-circle, but I felt a thousand feet off the ground. Dustin then asked the audience—my six friends and the other five strangers in the room— to join the band in singing “Happy Birthday” to me. A little girl was glowing in the basement of First Baptist Church, and how many people walked the streets above unaware?
Sometimes I do this thing where I try to imagine living someone else’s life—especially a someone who seems to have all of the things I might think I want— and then I ask myself if I would make the switch if I could. The answer is always no, and not even a hesitant no. It’s an emphatic and desperate no.
I think about the people who were walking overhead that night in downtown Murray, all those 25 years ago. And how, if you had asked them to switch places with this little girl who was having her most golden moment in the near-empty corner of a church basement concert, they would have laughed at the thought. But she wouldn’t have turned it over to them anyway. She wouldn’t have traded it with a queen.
But it’s not just in these golden moments that I cling so desperately to this one life I’ve been given. I feel it in the pits of despair, too. Even in my darkest moments, I do the thing: I ask, “Well, what if you were such-and-such? Would you trade your life with such-and-such?”
No. Never. And do you know why I think that is? I think it’s because I can’t imagine not loving the things I love. It’s not just that I wouldn’t be married to Andrew, but that I wouldn’t love him. It’s not just that Rosemary wouldn’t be my daughter, but that I wouldn’t love nuzzling my face into the crook of her neck. I wouldn’t love the rainbows that dance on the walls of my entryway; I wouldn’t love hearing the reassuring and steady voice of my best friend; I wouldn’t love gathering around the communion table with my church family; I wouldn’t love our family’s favorite park, or my parents’ faces, or my back porch, or the the sounds of my oldest son tinkering on the piano.
It’s a terrifying thought: entering into my house as a stranger—separated not just from the relationship with my people and things, but also from my love of them. What a gift to have been given this one wild and precious life. Not just to live it, but to love it.
Today is my 40th birthday, so I’m thinking about these things. I’m considering the past 40 years, and how it might look like a slim-showing-in-a-church-basement sort of life to a stranger. But not to me. I’m floating. I would make a flip-book of my life if I could, and watch it over and over, and over again.
I hope you feel the same about your life. I hope you wouldn’t dare trade it with a queen. Who else could love the things you love like you do? Who else would love it enough to print it frame-by-frame?
And what about you, dear Reader? Would you give me the gift of telling me about your favorite birthday?
Happy Birthday, Elizabeth. I like what you’re doing with your life. I’m not just saying that so I can be Fan of the Month.
Happy birthday! I love the way you weave your stories together.