No. 617 – Miss You

Performer: The Rolling Stones

Songwriters: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards

Original Release: Some Girls

Year: 1975

Definitive Version: Steel Wheels Tour, 1989

I was very into the Rolling Stones for a very brief time—in 1989, right at the time I moved to Grand Blanc. Sometime not long after, they broadcast one of the shows from their Steel Wheels Tour over the radio, and I recorded the whole thing. It was a pretty good show, and I was very into Steel Wheels, so I was listening to this tape a lot in the days leading up to Christmas.

Another thing I was doing was trying to find things to do to occupy my time. One of the towns south of Grand Blanc, which itself is south of Flint, is Holly. Holly, at least at the time, was trying to become a Brown County or a Galena, Ill., for those of you who are familiar with those areas. In other words, it was trying to be a quaint center of antiquing and bed and breakfasts.

The results at least back then were hit or miss, but I liked driving down there and going through the stores. Some stores had some cool stuff, and some had nothing but junk.

By 1991, I probably stopped going to Holly at all, but in the early days of my Flint tenure, I went there a lot. My favorite store was shaped like a large U, and the quality of the merchandise declined as you moved farther away from the entrance. The coolest thing they had was a Quartermaster’s desk, which essentially was a desk for two people. It was nice … and expensive—$1,800, which at the time was as far out of my league as a single-A scrub is from the majors.

A lot of stuff in Holly was like that. I almost never bought anything, because it was always too expensive. One time I bought this leather-bound cigar box, which was perfect for hauling around my best baseball cards.

Anyway, shortly before Christmas 1989, I was invited to a party at the apartment at one of the Journal reporters. I drove down in a light snow listening to my Stones bootleg tape, looking forward to having a good time and maybe meeting a few people closer to my age.

The party was a bust, at least for me. None of the guys I had attended a Northwestern football game with at Michigan State soon after my arrival was present, and I don’t mingle easily.

Early on, I made a lightly mocking comment to the party host about a work issue, and she took way more offense than I certainly thought the comment merited. (I later learned this wasn’t unusual behavior on her part.) That broke up the group I was in, and for the next half-hour I was confined more or less to the sofa by myself. So I split.

But the truth is I wasn’t really in much a party frame of mind. Sara, from whom I had had a somewhat revealing and disappointing parting when I left Herald City, had started calling me. I knew that there was no way this would work out given I lived 6 hours away now, but you know how it is when the sweet siren song of the impossible finds your ears. I suddenly wanted what I couldn’t have.

And then Sara went and invited me to come over for dinner at her place on Christmas that year. What’s that about a siren’s call?