Zen Music Moment - Changes

Zen Music moment

I sat in the small Pizza King restaurant in Lyons Kansas. The overhead fluorescent lights gave a bluish hue to everything. Late, and tired, I was bushed. My first year of college football and the practices were killing me. I had been used to being the big dog in high school, but now I was getting pounded daily. I was trying to adjust to college classes, and it was a new thing. High school had been way too easy for me.
In the small town of Sterling, there was very little to do after the evening rolled in. Late, after study, or goofing off, a few of us discovered the pizza place from some of the local guys. It was a 15 minute drive from Sterling to Lyons, and there we sat, waiting on hot pizza and Coca Cola. We let the frustration of being a freshman, confused and bewildered, slide away with something familiar. The jukebox played and we watched the pretty Lyons high school girls waitress.
I have this memory, of myself and friend and future room mate Terry Brady, sitting there, elbows propped on the plastic red and white checkerboard tablecloth. The new song that played over the jukebox seemed very appropriate to me. David Bowie’s “Changes.”

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon you're gonna get a little older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
I said that time may change me
But I can't trace time

Changes seemed to be washing over me like waves on the beach. Yes, it was a small college and in a small town, but suddenly I was outside the comfort zone, and an unknown. The coaches didn’t know me from any other freshman. The professors didn’t know my reputation as a good student and I was a little homesick and beaten.
Things were changing.

I thought I had to keep up the facade of being brave, tough and a football stud while daily I actually felt lost, beaten and alone. The new friends I made, including Terry, helped to soothe that feeling of displacement and fear. We were comrades, me, Terry, Mack, Don, Greg, Sammy , John and others who all started as a high school football standout and now began life again at the bottom of the food chain. We bonded from common experience and common situation.
But, there at Pizza King, as the pretty blond waitress named Dixie waited on us, for a just a few moments, Bowie’s song washed over us. Thoughtful, listening to the words and another day of challenge waited outside the door, more changes would have to wait for another slice of pepperoni and a glass of Coke.