Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (28)

I can now only recall two of my co-office workers in the upstairs office where I had my desk at Bulova. One was a white woman clerk in her 30's whom most men would have likely considered physically attractive, who was married (and whose children were probably then in elementary school) to a culturally straight white guy, who had some kind of blue-collar working-class job, yet wasn't anti-capitalist or leftist, philosophically. The other was a white woman in her early 20's named Claudia, who was also married, but who didn't have children yet and who seemed somewhat in touch with an apolitical version of late 1960's and 1970's rock music and youth culture.

Most men likely found the dark-haired Claudia physically attractive. She was also friendly and seemed like someone who had smoked or was continuing to smoke pot with her husband on weekends. She reminded me somewhat of some of the young, apolitical and non-intellectual white working-class women I had been physically attracted to in the late 1960's, when I was a student activist at CUNY's experimental upper-division college, Richmond College, on Staten Island.

So after bumping into Claudia outside of the Bulova office building a few times when we happened to have boarded the same IRT subway car on either a morning commute to or evening commute from work, I actually did write a folk song that expressed how I was starting to feel attracted to Claudia. But after her husband picked her up after work one day in his car--and I realized that he was her husband and not just a current boyfriend--I pretty much quickly stopped singing my "Claudia's Song" when I practiced my guitar at home. 

I never mentioned to her that I had written a folk song for her. And, within a few years, I had both lost the song lyric sheets and had totally forgotten the melody and words of  "Claudia's Song" forever. I guess I hadn't spent long enough practicing the song for it to become engraved in my memory for life. 

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