Grounded: Making the Best of Things With Dire Straits

by editor Michele Catalano

Winter 1978. I’m sixteen. My bedroom is in the front of the house, looking onto the street. I have a wooden desk, a real classroom desk my uncle brought me from some school he was renovating. There are all kinds of names and designs carved into the wood by many hands. My desk is right in front of the window. I’m a nosy kid. I like to see what’s going on outside my door, especially if I’ve been forced by my parents to stay in my room because of some perceived wrong I have committed. The windows are covered with Venetian blinds. Not the little, bitty mini-blinds of today, but three-inch, comes-in-white-only aluminum blinds, which end up misshapen because I constantly bend the slats to see what’s going on in the world of the un-grounded.

I’m studying for a social studies exam by copying all of my class notes onto loose leaf paper. It’s the only way I can study and remember the facts—forced repetition. It’s dark out, but not quite night. It’s 5 o’clock-during-winter dark. Tonight, I close the blinds because it’s snowing. I know that if I start to stare at the falling snow, I will become hypnotized by the way the flakes swirl under the streetlights, and I really, really need to study for this test.

I can hear them laughing outside. I hear car tires crunching through the fresh, packed snow and then a skritching, which is the sound that winter boots make when being dragged against snow. My friends were skitching - that’s the art of hanging onto a car’s bumper in fresh snow and hitching a ride down the street - right outside my window, while I was being held captive by the intricacies of early Greek civilization.

So I turn up the radio to drown out their fun. I’m listening to WNEW-FM (102.7), the premier rock station in the world. Sultans of Swing comes on. I stare morosely at my social studies textbook while singing along. I take a peek or two out the window, bending the blinds back just a bit so no one can see me spying. I watch the snow fall. I watch my next-door neighbor grab hold of the bumper of a car. I watch the neighbor’s Christmas lights come on. The whole scene is so winter wonderland, so perfectly choreographed that I, being a sixteen year old female, instantly feel a wave of self-pity wash over me.“Sultans of Swing” plays on, and the music itself feels isolating and stark; a perfect match for my sudden bleak mood.

I decide that I’m going to let Dire Straits soundtrack this snowy night, imprisoned in my room. “Sultans of Swing” becomes the winter song for me; for the rest of my life it would speak to me of snowdrifts and watching the TV to see if my school would be closing in the morning. The entire album becomes a seasonal mantra, and “Down to the Waterline” and “Water of Love” drift out of my room every time it snows. The constant accompaniment makes me feel as if I’m in a musical snowglobe, and every time someone shakes it, these songs play as the snow flutters down.

But this particular night it is “Sultans,” that song alone, that puts me in a mood to write.

I push the schoolwork aside and drag over the Olivetti while Mark Knopfler sings about Guitar George. I proceed to type out a piece of over-the-top, morbid, morose poetry that I immediately fold up and stuff in the drawer I empty every week. Later that night, the drawer is filled with crumpled-up paper, all tell-tale remnants of the times I try to imitate Knopfler’s storytelling ability, to mimic his cadence in my poetry in a way that would turn the poems into lyrics. I try to write about things other than death and drugs, shaking off the habit of channeling Jim Morrison. I think up scenarios that would make good songs, but I keep coming back to George and Harry and the jazz bar of Knopfler’s imagination.

The song ends, and I hear the familiar skritching sound outside of boots on snow. I know if I ask my father instead of my mother, he’ll let me go out for a little while, to have some fun. But the thing is, I don’t really want to go out. I want to stay inside with Dire Straits and the make-believe worlds they connect me with. I don’t want to run through the snow or take my life into my hands on the back of a car. I don’t want to be cold. I like the warmth of my room. I like turning off the overhead light to write by the Christmas lights on the shelves. I like listening to Dire Straits while I study for an English Lit quiz. There’s no need to go out there. 

I play “Sultans of Swing” again and sit down at my typewriter. I channel Knopfler to the best of my ability. What I write ends up in the junked drawer, and that’s fine. Just to have connected so soundly with a record makes staying in worth it. I have made a friend, who I know will be around every winter, forever, sharing in the memories of snowy nights and bad teenage poetry.