No. 339 – Send Her My Love

Performer: Journey

Songwriters: Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry

Original Release: Frontiers

Year: 1983

Definitive Version: Greatest Hits Live, 1998

To say that Beth and I couldn’t agree on anything would be an exaggeration. We agreed on a lot of things—Friendly’s ice cream, for example. We agreed on the Blue Lotus and Da Vinci’s. We agreed on Genesis and Phil Collins, The Police and Journey. And after the joys of intimacy were revealed fully, we definitely agreed on that.

But there were things on which we didn’t see eye to eye. Old movies: Beth loved them—Gene Kelly in particular—I didn’t (and still don’t). The Who and Led Zeppelin. Me: Two thumbs up. Beth: Two thumbs in her ears.

Then there’s the big one—baseball. I think in the nearly five years we dated, we might have gone to one baseball game together. I say might, because I kind of recall taking Beth to see the Clippers once. I want to say we did this early on, and she humored me because she wanted me to like her, but afterward she revealed that she hated baseball and was bored the whole time.

Obviously, this was a problem, and just as obviously I wasn’t going to stop being a baseball fan. So, like with my tapes of The Who and Led Zeppelin, I talked or watched baseball only when Beth wasn’t around. If I went to a game, it was with Scott. The good news was it never affected my watching the playoffs or World Series, because those happened in the fall when I was ensconced at my he-man woman-hater’s club of Wabash.

I had to drag Beth kicking and screaming to see The Natural. Of course, she loved it—perhaps not as much as I loved Risky Business, which she dragged me kicking and screaming to see before—but as much as I knew she would based on what I knew about the movie.

Of course, Beth being Beth, she couldn’t give me the satisfaction of telling me I was right. When we left Loews Arlington and I asked what she thought, she said she hated it and was bored. The fact that she had a superwide grin on her face and a spring in her step gave her away. Fine. I told you so.

Beth might have hated baseball, but she loved me. In fact, for my 19th birthday, Beth got me one of the greatest birthday presents ever. It was the Baseball Encyclopedia, the Big Mac—my first one. I had wanted one for years, but the $40 price was always too much either for me or my parents to pull the trigger.

When I went over to her house on my birthday, Beth invited me in, and I walked right past the book, never seeing it until Beth said, let’s go into the living room. And there it was, sitting upright on the secretary desk close to the door unwrapped with a single red bow atop. It was an awesome sight.

So what does that have to do with this song? You mean besides the fact that this was all going on when Frontiers was all over MTV and the radio? Well, would you believe that Beth and I couldn’t even agree on “our song”? She thought it was Faithfully; I thought this song was more appropriate when you consider I was gone all the time. (Besides, it’s a better song.) We agreed to disagree.

Kids …