Some Kind of Spinning Away

It's possible this song might be the first top 40 hit I remember from my youth, but like too much with the memory thing (or is that the fact thing?), when I look up the real true details, my memory is a mess. This was a a hit in 1970, but I'm remembering it from the years at the town's pool, Rello's, privately owned, where my sisters both worked summers as teens collecting fees/checking memberships at the gate and where I learned to swim, and what's now more valuable as real estate so is just filled in land plus everyone has their own pools now, so who needs community and the hope of crushes and the whole employee class of lifeguards who mostly just practiced winding the string on their whistles both left and right.

But at the snack bar, on the juke box, "Hitchin' a Ride." Now, do I really recall this from being seven? Was it still on the box for years, a top 5 hit someone liked, so the 45 never left its place? Is it just a song left spinning on the turntable in my head, a head old enough it still has a turntable in it?

I don't know. It's an old head that loves its turntable. And so I've avoided metaphors of the deep end, or the fear of the high dive, or telling the tale of the Rello grandchild, one of twins, who at age 10 died of weird complications after having his tonsils out. We knew the family, it was that kind of town. Also the kind where few probably read Thackeray (even if the band screwed with his novel's title), hitch hiking was considered something people from lesser, coarser towns would do, and being a one hit wonder would be an achievement, a getting out, a moment suburbia might bubble to something less sub-, if only for as long as the single played. How much hope can you expect so far down the Passaic River, where it's insignificant enough even William Carlos Williams wouldn't bother to write about it.