oh my head

In 1984 I was spending two to three hours every week in an office in the guidance department at North Reading High School in Massachusetts. Back then I was a youth outreach worker for the Drug and Alcohol Resource Program in Stoneham, some 12 miles south. Kids would drop in to visit me in the borrowed office on their own, rarely sent by a teacher, often to skip a class – “I’m going to talk to that guy about my drinking,” stuff. A young man named Joe came regularly, him a year sober at that time, and wanting to talk seriously about the deal. This was entirely to my good fortune. In fact, Joe is featured prominently in the last section of my new book, “Joy in the Journey.”

Two of the students stopping in were a couple of young women best friends. I cannot remember their names, though I’ll never forget them. One of them had a habit of often saying, “Oh my head.” As in “Oh my head” this is crazy cool, or “Oh my head” here’s another shit storm, or “Oh my head” why’s my life like this. I’ve kept “Oh my head” close to my heart all these years.

Those two told me that some nights they’d walk out to the middle of Route 62 and just walk down the road, cars passing one way or the other, sometimes both ways at once. It was exciting, they said, better than normal. Years later I wrote a song titled “Underclassmen Blues,” and created the bridge thanks to the “Oh my head” girls — “Sometimes I walk for miles down the middle of the road. Cars rush by north south, transport their ghostly load. But I feel like I’m alive then, and that people really see me. It’s the only time I’m even close to acting kind of free.”

You learn stuff working with and for people, or, I suppose, make up stuff. Either way, it’s good and it’s important, and maybe more often than you think, positive things spring out from the gloom.