I want to explain my first musical experience so you can understand why Seaside Attraction means the world to me. So please allow me to digress back to when I was a freshman in high school - back to that significant moonlit evening.
***
The first time I heard the drums - I mean really heard them - was in the moonlight.
Oh that sweet syncopation! It had my heart beat-beating in time like a metronome of passion, it had my foot tap-tapping on two and four, it had me jiving like none other brother.
I was sitting in an endless hallway of lockers, back against the wall, listening to someone practicing long after sunset and I was of course dying with curiosity to find out who it was, but being only fourteen at the time I found it embarrassing to admit to whoever it was that I'd been swooning in the hallway for nearly two hours. So instead I cooked up a cunning plan: I'll just knock on the door and ask whoever's in there if they're planning on joining us for Mr. Felina's afterschool movie night.
Cut to:
I knock-knocked on the door - loudly so it could be heard above the beats - and the drumming stopped abruptly. Trepid footsteps approached and a tentative hand turned the doorknob - the door opened and my jaw dropped: it was April.
I promptly stammered over my lame excuse for interrupting her practice session: "Oh hey April... well...er...well I just...er...just wanted to ask...er...if you're going to th-that movie tonight." She looked me straight in the eye as I threw these words up on her. She considered me for a moment before saying, "I wasn't planning on it...but I suppose I could do with a break. What time does it start?" Now, I hadn't thought this far in my plan - I had no idea April was in there (let alone that April even played the drums) and I also wasn't expecting whoever was in there to join us film nerds in our viewing of Every Man Should Care About Time (an incredibly sexist movie about a speechwriter who by day writes speeches for the governor of Ohio and who by night writes secret speeches with titles such as: Why Men Are More In Tune to Time than Women and The Tremendous Time-Flaw in Women-kind).
"Okay. Well..er..it starts at seven." She eyed me suspiciously and nodded. "We've got a bit of time then. You can come in and watch me practice if you'd like - I know you were out there listening in." I gulped. How had she known? "Oh okay." Completely blown away by the fact that April (of all the people!) was a drummer and still completely breathless due to her stunning drumming skills I could do nothing but surrender to her right there and then: the ball was utterly in her park. We were going to do whatever she wanted.
She stood back to let me into the practice room and sat down behind the drum set. I settled myself in seat in the corner of the room and she went right back to practicing as though nothing had interrupted her.
My heart swelled into a million balloons all blown up and then they blew away into the moonlit night. As I listened to her play a million starlit images burst through my mind of her and me together: us together in a playground in the middle of the night and me asking her 'do you like los cumplios?' Us together flying through the sky and me asking her 'do you believe in the Good Life?' Us together holding hands in a ghost town and me asking her 'do you believe in los fantasmas?' These starlit images flashed upon the outward eye as I listened. There were so many images, each one stronger than the last, that it got to the point where the classroom completely faded from my vision...
'I think he's stirring.'
'Look. His eyes are fluttering open.'
I woke to find myself lying on the classroom floor with April and Mr. Felina hunched over my helpless form. April took my hand (not in a flashing starlit image, but in real actual life) and said to me the words that have stayed in my heart to this day:
"The life of the song is in my heart."
***
And this is why April and that moonlit night means the world to me. It was the first time I understood why people dedicate their lives to one thing only. That night I found my one thing in April's drumming.