Travel Music 1: Pole-vaulting a borderline, 1985.

My musical tastes never were particularly avant-garde. They are what they are, influenced heavily by early exposure to swing and big band music, which is to say I'm a very melody-based type of guy. As an adult, I've learned to appreciate and enjoy atonality, bebop and the Bulgarian women's choir. But when I was a kid, it wasn't quite the same.

Straight up: Pop isn't a dirty word in my lexicon. Never has been, never will be.

Back during the 1980s, my entire life was organized on a 24-7-365 travel footing. If not actually wandering the European continent, I was reading voraciously and planning another trip, working multiple low-rent jobs to save enough money to make my dreams come true. There simply wasn't cerebral time remaining to actively seek out new music, and besides, how quickly we forget the relative paucity of options in the prehistoric, pre-Internet planet.

There was some MTV, and later VH1. There was local radio, and at the time, quite a lot of classical music, then as now on WUOL 90.5 FM. There were people close to me who'd make suggestions. So it went. I'm surprised I ever learned anything at all.

All of this is prelude to the startling revelation that of all the world's music that might have settled into the weird archive between my ears, where music plays all the time and has done so for as long as I can remember, the song I always associate with my first overseas journey in 1985 is Madonna's "Borderline."

I heard the song numerous times just prior to departure, and it never really went away. In fact, in a metaphorical sense, that initial foray out into the world did indeed involve stepping across a considerable borderline -- I'd done nothing, been nowhere and was in the process of embracing the notion of "late bloomer" and straining it into comic incredulity. As noted previously, in spite of all the laborious planning and research, I was well aware how remarkably terrified I was of the interactions necessary to make the trip work ... and how equally cognizant I was of absolutely having to do it, or else resign myself to complete a homeland trek to irrelevance.

A bouncy Madonna pop song may not deserve to be fiercely metaphorical, and yet one's sub-conscious sometimes does the choosing for you. Maybe it worked, because that very first trip in 1985 certifiably changed my life, and it's why I smile every time I hear the song.