I parked next to a battered blue van today, and when the “Chevy Van” lettering on its passenger side came into view, it was like someone had released the “Pause” button and the song resumed. I was immediately transported to the 13-year-old I was in 1975, engulfed in emotions, longings, and body sway, lost in lyrics about loose and easy love, a powerful sense that there was something there, something just out of reach, that I wanted.
The certainty of knowing a beautiful stranger would make love to you. No doubt, no worry, no wondering if you were good enough. Just the assurance that love will – of course – happen between you and the person you want most at that moment, and that neither one of you will cling desperately to the encounter because you’re both stronger than that. Two full people with enough self-love to be relaxed about loving another. Neither one of you were missing anything essential before you met, so you don’t need anyone to fill in an empty space. The freedom to love another person, then let them walk away, back to their life, content with the knowledge you’ll never see them again. Because you don’t have to. “And that’s all right with me,” Sammy Johns repeats at the end of every verse. And he meant it.
To this day, I have not achieved casual love. I love as if it’s crucial. Of course, the 70’s showed us all that there’s a little something missing if love is only casual. And the 80’s and 90’s pandemic of sex-on-demand creates boredom and loneliness, not lasting satisfaction. But, still, I’d have appreciated a few years of un-self-conscious encounters based on ease, smoothness, the subtle sliding of a moment of conversation or activity into the realm of the sensual, the conviction that sexuality could be part of any relationship if someone just was open. I’d have loved the freedom of the stance that whatever unfolds will be all right with me – and I’d have preferred it during my adolescent and young adult years when I was figuring love out, rather than waiting ‘til a lot later for some semblance of this kind of acceptance.
I’ve been singing the song – to myself and out loud – ever since seeing that van. It must have been lodged in my mind back in 1975, as the words came back to me in one entire, seamless stream. Even tonight, editing this post in a public library, earplugs protecting the privacy as I play and replay the song, I am filled as completely as I was filled in 1975 with a moment of pure, absolute all-right-ness. Perhaps it’s going to be my midlife mantra – to live as if I was spending a night in a Chevy van, loving easily in the moonlight, knowing that everything, absolutely everything, is all right.