If I could set my life to music, I’d play an endless loop of Iron and Wine’s “Flightless Bird, American Mouth.” My favorite lines in that song open the second verse: “Then when the cops closed the fair/ I cut my long baby hair/ and stole me a dog-eared map/ and called for you everywhere.” By my ear, this song laments the death of innocence. And according to this song, it’s a very long, drawn-out death. So long, in fact, it takes a lifetime to travel. 
For a long time now, I’ve known that the fair is closed, and yet I still crave the same old maps in hope that the things I’ve lost can be found again. Then, on my 36th birthday, I realized that the fair I’d been wistfully trying to resurrect was yet another wizardly machination. It turns out that Dorothy’s ruby slippers are a hoax. No matter how many times I click my heels, I will never go home again.
The grief of this epiphany hit me last week on a trip down the turnpike to the City of Brotherly Love, where we planned to celebrate another year of life come and gone with the usual fine food and birthday candles. Philadelphia was kicking off its annual weeklong celebration of the nation’s birth with fireworks—as fitting a way as any to set my own celebration of birth and life ablaze. After all, I’ve been seeking my own independence for some time now. We crossed over the state line and saw the city skyline peeking over the horizon. In the backseat, Jack wrestled with the straps of his car seat, trying to break free. Suddenly, on the radio, some announcer declared the death of the King of Pop. And just like that, the Wizard of Oz peeked out from under the curtain, scrawny and scared. On my birthday—the one day each year that still reduces me to a four-year-old girl—Michael Jackson, the pop icon of my youth, died.
Ever since Thursday, the radio waves have been clicking a nation’s worth of ruby slippers in hope of returning all of us to the exuberant 80’s, a time I remember so well as my childhood. Those were the years before all of the weirdness and all that talk of terrible things behind closed doors. Those were the years of my Neverland—when I still had my long baby hair and the fair still seemed as real as my own skin.
After I heard the news of Michael Jackson’s death, I didn’t feel much like celebrating. The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had lost his wings. Surely, most would argue that he lost them a long time ago. But the death of innocence is a long journey. So long, in fact, I’m still making the flight.
#1 by Rebecca Hersh at June 29th, 2009
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I’d love some unpacking of the sentence, “Those were the years before all of the weirdness and all that talk of terrible things behind closed doors.” Are you talking about Michael Jackson here? Or yourself?
#2 by Crys at July 13th, 2009
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I absolutely love your imagery in this post. You’ve done a wonderful job in expressing how so many of us felt. With most of us too young to recall Elvis or JFK or even Lennon, Michael was the shining star of OUR youth and spoke to the passion of life in all of us who witnessed the birth of his legend.
Watching that star fall so suddenly from the sky, I now understand the commotion surrounding the other three. There is something in each of us that sails upon the wings of the dreams of greatness seen in others; and that part of us dies with them.
It is an odd bittersweetness.