Last week, as many of you know, I wrote a series of posts in the “memoir” category I call Tempus Fugit (Time Flies) about a boy, a girl, and their painfully brief schoolyard romance at Coral Park in November of 1972.
I called it Tempus Fugit: Remembering Cheryl T – 50 Years Later, and even though I meant to write just one post, the story refused to be thus constrained and one part multiplied into three (and an epilogue). Additionally, I wrote a 10-part cycle of haikus titled School, 1972.
Now, I am not going to write another long memoir piece about Cheryl T today or in the near future. Writing the first three parts was laborious; each of the first three posts in the series took me an average of 10 hours of writing, reading, revising, posting, re-reading, catching mistakes, unpublishing, revising again, and reposting, That’s a lot of time sitting at my desk, staring at a computer monitor, and typing on a keyboard, so it’s physically tiring, even when I take an occasional break to eat a meal, take a shower, use the toilet, or just get up and stretch.
It was also emotionally exhausting. As I wrote in Remembering Cheryl T- 50 Years Later (Epilogue) yesterday:
This, hopefully, will be the last time I’ll write about Cheryl T. Even 50 years on, I sometimes feel the same sense of loss and sorrow that I did when my mom said she had misplaced Cheryl’s phone number and realized that my only link to her was gone. (You have no idea, Dear Reader, how hard I cried when I heard that, or the many times I looked in our house in Westchester for that phone number during those first, awful, I’ll-never-see-her-again days in November of ’72.) I’m not sorry that I’ve written – and published – Remembering Cheryl T, but it still fucking hurts, y’know?
Unless something totally unexpected happens – like if the Cheryl Thigpen from 1972 should come across my blog, read the series, and reach out to me via the Contact Me form – I think the series arc is complete. There is no more to that story, folks, and visiting that particular section of my Hall of Memories has not been much fun. Creatively useful, certainly, but intensely painful.
As I noted this morning on my Facebook page:
Whoever says men don’t cry, or that they aren’t capable of deep feelings is either not very observant or a liar. I don’t know how many tears I spilled while I was writing paragraphs like this in my Remembering Cheryl T series:
It’s strange. I never really got to know the real you at all; I didn’t get to know what music you liked, or what TV shows you watched. If you had a complete set of parents or if you lived in a single-parent household. Did you have pets? Do you like sports? Were you a tomboy? Were you a reader, like me, or did you prefer playing board games or collecting Barbies or other toys? What was your favorite food in the world when you were nine? I never found out what your favorite color was, although I do remember that you favored clothes that had either blue or pink.
And yet…of all my heartbreaks, and every single relationship I’ve had since I met you in Ms. Turtletaub’s class has involved heartbreak in one way or another, losing you 24 hours after we exchanged those notes in class hurts the most mainly because while we didn’t have a relationship, the promise of one was there. We just didn’t have the chance to see it through.
Maybe someday, not soon, but in the unforeseeable future, I might have the intestinal fortitude necessary to either write a screenplay or a novel loosely based on this particular chapter of my life here in the United States. For now, though, the Remembering Cheryl T series will remain as is, a trilogy of WordPress blog posts and an epilogue.
Now, most of you know that I am “into” movie soundtracks and film scores. I fell in love with music from the movies as a small child, and when I began collecting music albums in earnest in 1978, one of the first LP records I owned was 20th Century Records’ Star Wars: Original Soundtrack Composed and Conducted by John Williams – Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. And although the classical music “section” of my CD collection is far larger, the Movies & Shows category is…substantial.
And since I am also a screenwriter – though not a prolific or particularly adept one – I tend to see stories in cinematic terms. As I write – especially when I deal with the Tempus Fugit category of this blog – I not only “see” the events I’m describing as if there was a movie projector showing images in the theater of my skull, but I’m constantly going either to my Amazon Music app or to YouTube and selecting “cues” for the “original motion picture soundtrack from the WordPress blog.”
And, if the music seems to fit the story – especially the mood and theme, though usually not the period – I will add the video to my blog posts.
(I have yet to get any feedback about the music I add to any of my posts, so I have no idea if readers play the videos I include, or, if they do, whether they like the music and respond to it.)
I have – at this point in time, anyway – no desire to write Remembering Cheryl T: The Motion Picture; but I do like speculating what the temp track (a temporary soundtrack consisting of pre-existing music used by directors or producers to give a composer a general idea of what they would like to hear in the score) to such a film would be like.
So, without further ado, here are my suggestions for such a “temp track” – maybe someday we could get Michael Giacchino or even John Williams to compose a terrific score for Remembering Cheryl T!
- Main Titles: Concerto for flute, harp & orchestra in C major, K. 299 (K. 297c), II. Andantino – W. A. Mozart
- First Day at Coral Park Elementary School: “To the Colors” Bugle Call (Traditional)/ “The Star Spangled Banner”
- Cheryl’s Theme: (Where Dreams Are Born from “A.L.” – John Williams/Piano Cover)
- Halloween – 1972/Dreaming of Cheryl (The Reunion from “A.I.” – John Williams)
- Falling in Love: “For Always” solo by Lara Fabian from “A.I.” – John Williams
- Operation Love Sonnet/Passing the Notes in Class: Perhaps Love – John Denver
- The Girl in the Pink Sweater/One Cold Day in November 1972; Poco Allegreto, Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90 – Johannes Brahms
- Farewell, Cheryl: Symphony No. 2 in E-minor, Op. 27: Adagio (3rd Movement) – Sergei Rachmaninov
- Remembering Cheryl T & End Credits: “For Always” Duet by Lara Fabian and Josh Groban – John Williams
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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