Easy Tonight

Sometimes life has a way of leading you to where you need to be.

The summer of 2000 was a somewhat tumultuous one for me.  I had graduated from college.  I was anticipating heading to London, all by myself, for graduate school.  And I was living at home for a few months - for the first time in four years.  It was a time of major transitions.

A huge part of that major transition was a break up with my high school, and college, boyfriend. We had been together for six years, gone to the high school prom together, and stayed together through four years at Penn State.  But as of that summer, our break up was inevitable.  While I was headed to graduate school in England, he was moving to LA to pursue his dreams in the film industry.  We were going to be more than just bi-coastal.  We knew it was going to be over.


He moved to LA in August, and I made a trip out there a few weeks later, shortly before I was to leave for London.  It was an awkward and sad weekend.  I don't remember the details of most of it, but I do remember that our last morning was an emotional one with lots of tears.  On our drive to LAX, I remember a song coming on the radio that I hadn't heard before.  These were the days of Napster illegal downloads (remember that?), and I was constantly trying to think of songs to download and burn to CDs to bring with me on my trip abroad.  The song struck me, and I actually wrote down some lyrics from it in the car so I could try and figure out the title to download it when I returned home.  It went something like "two dimes in the telephone" .... "It's alright."  At least, that's what I wrote down.

We got to the airport.  We said goodbye.  And I cried almost the entire plane ride home.

When I got home, I tried to download that song I had heard.  I couldn't find it!  Google was not yet on the scene, and despite my best efforts, I never did find that song, and it haunted me.  Of course life went on, and I spent two amazing years in England, but every few months I would continue to search for this song to no avail.  I would even ask around on occasion, but no one in England had ever heard of it.

Fast forward two and a half years.  It was the early hours of a morning in January, in a law school dorm room in Philadelphia.  I was with some law school friends drinking and listening to music.  For some reason, the song came back to me once again.  I told one of my law school classmates about my quest to find this song, and muttered the fragment of the lyrics I knew: "two dimes in the telephone."  Immediately, he responded, "Oh, I know that song.  That's Five for Fighting.  It's called 'Easy Tonight.'"

I was in shock.  This was my white whale.  And it was that easy?  This guy just knew the song?

That guy was my future husband.  We started dating a few weeks later.  And this is the song: