Denizens Of The Top Five

What is the only thing from my youth that I would love to get back besides the usual youthful physical attributes? I wish I had kept my Top Five lists. I only compiled my Top Five lists for a season or so when I was in 8th grade. I typed them out on an ancient Royal typewriter in the converted den of the house we lived in on Prindle Drive in Smyrna. I recall yellow shag carpet and dead flies scattered by the sliding glass door that led to the covered back patio of pebble stones. This room was oppressively hot during the day, so I didn’t use the room except late at night. This made it perfect for compiling my Top Five lists.

I would compose them once a week right after I arrived back home from an evening of roller skating in Murfreesboro at Jack’s. Roller skating was one of the major ways to socialize in an extracurricular way and for many of us this was a weekly ritual of delight. I’d get home around 10:30pm, since my parents never let me stay for the late skate which lasted until midnight, and I’d head for the den in an excited state to put the latest Top Five’s into posterity. What were the Top Five’s? It was quite simply a list of my favorite songs and girls of the week. Some weeks there might be no variation and then there might be a chaos of changes depending on events. I might meet a new girl at the roller skating rink or maybe at a pick up baseball game (that happened once) or perhaps a new song like “Another Bites The Dust” would come out and shoot straight to number one without ever being in the Top Five before. I took it as a serious task, but somewhere along the way the documents were lost. Maybe they’ll be found in an archaeological dig somehow preserved and the names of Pam Gilley, Christy Davenport, Jennifer Taylor, Lisa Sowell, and Sharon Bevel will be judged great since they were definite denizens of my 8th grade Top Five lists alongside such musical luminaries of the day as Pete Townshend, Queen, Kenny Loggins, AC-DC, and John Cougar.