Lately, I’ve been thinking about why, of all songs, it’s “Sunny Came Home” that I continue to love. I wanted the world to share in my excitement so pre-Facebook, I took to literal walls, writing Shawn Colvin lyrics across classroom white boards at my high school. It took maybe three days, and once I had Shawn Colvin’s name, I took to the phone and finally, on a Sunday afternoon, after maybe my eighth call into the radio station, the DJ, exasperated and frankly somewhat dubious of my zeal, finally played “Sunny Came Home.” I was prepared: a blank cassette tape in the deck, my fingers simultaneously poised over the play and record buttons. So I listened to the radio obsessively until they played the song again and I could discover from the DJ the name of the song and singer. Besides, my family didn’t have internet we owned a beautiful leather-bound set of Encyclopedia Britannica, which, like most things we’ve ever owned, was purchased on credit. There was no Google in 1997, and taking to the internet in search of answers to every question was not yet common. It took me several days to discover the singer’s identity and, until I did, I was a teenager obsessed. I remember the crescendo carrying me as if by canoe out of a deep sleep: “Days go by/I’m hypnotized/I’m walking on a wire/I close my eyes and fly out of my mind/Into the fire.” iPods hadn’t yet been introduced into the market. I’d fallen asleep that night wearing my Walkman, tuned to KISS 108 FM. And before that, we lived a life of tenancy in a Section 8 apartment in Medford, a six-minute walk from the Johnnie’s Foodmaster that marked the border into Malden. We’d been in that house in Marlborough, Massachusetts for about a year. This was sometime in September of 1997, and I was still living in the first and only house my family has ever mortgaged in this country. I was unable to verbalize my attraction, which I think is true at the beginning of any new wonder. But I couldn’t have anticipated its enduring effect back then. Twenty years ago, sometime between two and three in the morning, I came out of a deep sleep by a song that has remained my anthem.
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