Back in 2012, I passed a
kidney stone. Almost to the day, I was booked for a routine kidney scan 2 years later. In the waiting room was playing
SmoothRadio… the
Tavares version of
More Than a Woman came on and whoosh, I was in a space-time
wormhole. Anyone old enough will be aware of the requisite forcefield around memories from the late 1970s: it's there for everyone's protection.
The string of Tavares pop hits were unremarkable for me at the time. It wasn't until almost a decade later that Tavares became an anchor to my hometown of
New Bedford, when a schoolmate made a casual mention of the group while he was tuning his
ham radio into a transmitter on
The Azores. He warned that if Tavares were rehearsing, we would have to do the radio some other time. The perplexed look on my face prompted the response: they live next door and when they rehearse, all you can hear is them.
Three decades and 3,200 miles away from that moment all I can hear is Tavares again. And they highlight so much about where I am and from where I came. In the wormhole, I am in multiple places and times at once: I'm in New Bedford, that city full of
Portuguese immigrants from various island communities, mine The Azores, theirs
Cape Verde; I'm in a metropolis on this giant island by way of my Portuguese heritage; I'm in my teens; I'm in my midlife; I'm in a room agonising in so much pain I could not even contemplate fear, I'm in a hospital gazing out of a wormhole compromised of sonorous tethers of an American family of Cape Verdean descent.
