Oh Lord, won’t you buy me

There was a time when I had nothing. I lived on the edge, because I chose to. I chose to live there, because I had tried the world, had tried its riches, its treats, its wild call to adventure - it wasn’t for me. 

No, I preferred instead to live on the edge. I drove a scooter at the time, a tiny, rickety old thing. It didn’t go fast, but it meant freedom. I traded everything for freedom. Nothing else mattered, no family, no friendships, no companionship, no love, no laughter. All that mattered was the wind in my skirt and the song in my lungs and the endless night sky above me as the summer of 2007 stretched into infinity before me. 

And there it was, my best day ever, my favorite moment in time. 

I’d run away from home (I was a wild-child, can you guess?), and I was on a train, going towards the Hungarian border, the heat from the flat steppe that dominates the inner workings of this vast continent I’d been brought to bringing wind, and the smell of cattle that grazes the grasslands. 

I was going to a festival, the biggest festival of the year, the biggest festival in the country. As we got closer to the border, more and more like-minded people joined our caravan, joined us with their tents, and their six-packs of luke-warm beer. On the last leg of the journey, we all switched into a smaller train that brought us closer still to the music we were all drawn to. 

A boy was there, he had drum sticks (the music kind, not the chicken kind), and tapped away in a quiet rhythm. Tapp-tapp, beat, tapp-tapp. Beat beat. Tapp-tapp. Beat. I started nodding my head. My foot found the rhythm, found it, and joined it. 

I felt my throat close, then open. 

Another girl, sitting behind me clapped on the last tapp. 

A bearded hipster sort of man put his beer down with a clunk on the second beat. 

And then…. Nothing. We waited. And for a glorious, glorious second, there was silence. 

I felt myself float out of my body, all shyness forgotten. 

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me, a Mercedes Benz…”I sang.

Calls of  “Wooohoo” and “Oh hell yeah” joined the chorus, and the tapp-tapp and the clapp, and the clunk all joined in. And in the back of the train, there was a boy with a guitar, and his chords muddled their way through the crowd to our waiting ears. 

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me, a Mercedes Benz, my friends all drive Porsches…”

I stood, and I pulled the clapping girl up, and we all joined, we all joined together in singing. There was youth in the air, and freedom in our hearts, and we sang… we sang this song of great political import, we sang and we sang, in a tradition that was millennia old, here, together, we sang. As perfect strangers, as like-minded people, as sisters and brothers and all united, we sang. 

And the Lord never bought us anything… when the music died, we sat in silence as the steppe drifted closer beyond the window. We arrived and went our separate ways, got wasted, listened to other people make music. 

But for a moment, it was ours. The spirit of freedom had touched us. We’d owned it.