Solitary Man
As I sat at my computer grading assignments for my online Business Law class, Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” came up in my iTunes shuffle. Within seconds I was no longer thinking about contracts and genuine assent. I was thirteen years old again, lying in the rear-facing third seat of our family’s Chevy station wagon as we drove north on Highway 49 under a Mississippi night sky.
Daddy and my brother Keith and I were returning home late one school night following a basketball game on the coast. With its own speaker and separate volume control, that rear-facing seat was my favorite spot—prime real estate for road trips—particularly when I could have it to myself and could stretch out.
1962 Chevrolet Biscayne station wagon
It was a late winter night in the early weeks of 1967. The sky was crystal clear with the Milky Way dominating the vista from my recumbent position. I marveled at how the stars of Orion’s belt looked like a jetliner in flight. We had been to an end-of-season conference tournament down at Harrison Central High. Keith was a sophomore second-stringer on that year’s basketball team at Stone High, the county’s consolidated school in Wiggins. I was an 8th-grader in my final year at Home School, a county attendance center in the rural Big Level community where we lived. I was not looking forward to transferring into town for the next school year.
I don’t recall the team we faced that night, but we won the game and that Keith got several minutes of playing time. He even got a few baskets, so it was a good night. The car was quiet after we got on the highway and started that long stretch towards home. Daddy and Keith in the front seat were talking—about the game or maybe about hunting and fishing, their favorite topics—but the only thing I could hear was Neil plaintively singing “Solitary Man” as the radio played softly behind my head. My thoughts, however, were elsewhere.
I was thinking about high school. And I was thinking about Sharon, the pretty girl in the seventh grade, a year behind me. She and I had been sweet on each other for a couple of years, always flirting and teasing, but little more than that for fear of the taunting that would follow if we were too open about our attraction to each other. But now it was more just flirting, For several months now, Sharon was officially my girlfriend, and neither of us cared who knew it. Not since that first kiss the year before. It had happened one night in the school parking lot, beside her grandfather’s pickup and shielded from view by all the vehicles parked there as the community assembled for the one of the last ballgames of that school term. In the months that followed, we had been quite thick, spending as much time together as we could at school—playing silly games at recess, sitting together in the cafeteria and at ballgames, and on the bus to away games and field trips. There was also that wonderful evening in October at the county fair in Wiggins when our two families just happened to be there on the same night. She and I rode the Scrambler and the Ferris Wheel a half a dozen times and took in a few of the sideshows.
All of our classmates and teachers knew that Sharon was my girl, but I wasn’t entirely sure what my family knew. Keith and Judy, in high school with separate interests and activities, probably knew but did not seem to care. John, being three grades behind me was either unaware or oblivious to what little he may have seen at school. The same would have been even more true of Karen and Linda, my youngest siblings. Hindsight tells me that Mama and Daddy knew, as I remember an occasional bit of ribbing around the house and farm. But I’m quite sure none of them had any idea of just how smitten I really was.
My 13-year-old conflicted self (Russell Lott, March 1967)
But there, in the rear seat of that station wagon, listening to Neil sing about lost loves, I had a head full of doubt. I was thinking about Sharon and wondering if what we had would remain after I moved on to high school. The summer would be hard enough, but how would we survive being apart for a whole school year? At thirteen I didn’t yet know what heartbreak felt like, but that night I suspected it might be waiting for me somewhere ahead. At that point in my young life I had never suffered any real loss, and the prospect of such a separation filled me with emotions I had not experienced before.
Gazing at the night sky as we drove home, I sensed a loneliness that seemed as immense as the gulf separating me from the stars. It felt like the end of childhood, though I didn’t yet know why. What I had no way of knowing then—what I could not have imagined as I watched Orion sliding across the sky—was that my life was about to change in a way for which I had no understanding, let alone preparation. For it would be in just a few short days that Daddy would have the fateful automobile accident that would take his life.
Even all these years later, whenever I hear “Solitary Man,” I’m back in that rear-facing seat under a Mississippi nighttime sky, still wondering how a boy so young could already feel so alone.
Words to Ponder
con·flict·ed (adjective): being in a state of emotional confusion.
des·o·la·tion (noun): extreme sadness caused by loss or loneliness.
Source: yourdictionary.com & merriam-webster.com
SONG OF THE DAY
“Solitary Man” by Neil Diamond (The Feel of Neil Diamond, 1966)