Rick playing piano in the lounge of the Indiana Academy
In the same way countries have anthems, my life has an anthem.
I discovered it my junior year at the Indiana Academy, where I lived 4 hours away from home at the age of fifteen.
I’d never been more happy.
It’s where I had my first e-mail account and participated in sensationalized group arguments—where we competed to see who was superior of thought or moral stance.
It’s where I met people who were just as socially awkward and fashionably inappropriate as I was.
And it’s also where I first met my flaws, which I only recognized much, much later.
That junior year I became friends with Rick Steldt, who was a year ahead of me, and unlike anyone else I had met.
I had a serious crush on him—certainly a schoolgirl crush—but I deeply cared for him.
He taught me how to play cards (how to cheat at cards, too), and I came to love piano after many evenings of hearing him play in the dorm lounge—though not everyone was a fan. Whenever he sat down to practice, a group of people would always evacuate immediately. He was learning to play the piano version of “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses—not the prettiest thing you’ve ever heard. But I grew to adore that song beyond reason.
Rick was a cocky SOB, who wore a dark trench coat when going out for a smoke, often paired with a cowboy hat. But he was also the sensitive type. When he broke up with his girlfriend in the spring, he cried like a boy in the corner of the lounge, next to the piano. He was inconsolable the rest of the year.
When I was a senior, he returned to the Academy occasionally, to spend time with old friends, and to play “November Rain” just one more time.
Later, at college, he sometimes called and we talked on the phone. I had moved past my crush (and back then I thought he never knew about my crush—but of course he knew!), and I stayed on the line as long as he wanted, because he still meant so much to me.
By the time of his 10-year high school reunion, he had died. I wrote in a book for his family how he had taught me to play cards, and that this song, “November Rain,” was like a possession to be carried to my grave.
And such a strange song it is, by a group I don’t even like, sung by a man whose voice is like nails on a chalkboard. But I can’t stop loving it.
Did I choose it, or did it choose me? Just like true-blue writers who suffer with the blessing of talent (writing chose them), I tend to think November Rain chose me.
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