Songs of Experience

I don't remember a thing.

I was in Sydney 25 years ago. It was the first place outside the US I had ever been. I remember the message on the answering machine asking if I would play on a softball team going to Australia and not understanding how someone like me could go anywhere. I remember the program was called International Sports Exchange. I even remember changing planes at LAX and refueling in Tahiti, where beautiful women in grass skirts welcomed us with tropical flowers. But as far as the city itself, I remember mostly nothing.

We went on a harbour cruise and I took a whole roll of film of the opera house on my 110 camera. I remember the photos but hardly any of the experience. They took us to a koala park and a sheep farm where we threw boomerangs and some caves in the Blue Mountains when I saw my first kangaroo crossing sign, but I am not sure if my memories are real or if they come from photos. I remember one of the Australian players asking me why Sidney was spelled incorrectly on my high school team jacket, and I remember the softball games. I remember a girl named Holly and our trip to Chinese-owned souvenir shops near Kings Cross and I remember laughing because there was a pigeon inside a McDonalds.

I had no idea how a parliamentary system worked. I didn't know what white people had done to indigenous people anywhere and I found aboriginal things "exotic." I had no idea what rugby or cricket were. I had never heard of Midnight Oil and probably didn't know any Crowded House. I didn't even know a single opera then as I took all of those photos of the opera house. I knew nothing about the world, nothing at all. Heck, I was not even old enough to drink a beer, and the drinking age here is 18 like everywhere else in the world.

But U2 was already my favorite band by then.

I was obsessed with Australia after that, but the fake Australia, the one Americans know from Crocodile Dundee and Outback Steakhouse. Growing up in Ohio does that. Nobody travels; the only exposure to foreign things is from the fantasy world of television. It's why they vote as they do; they don't ever see the impact their poor decisions have on the rest of the world.

I caught the wanderlust then, and I have been sick with it ever since. I chose my university because of its study abroad program. Everything in my life for the last 25 years started because of this city that I am in right now.

But it is all brand new to my brain. I feel like I am starting a new chapter of my life. A lot of changes are coming.

The city is a city and as new to modern civilization as any American city. There are no medieval churches or Roman ruins, just those monuments to capitalism called skyscrapers, temples of the Profits made of steel and glass. I don't need it. I am spending four days on its beaches and in the great outdoors and that was the plan all along, although I am staying an extra night to...

...see U2 one more time! Yes!