Relaxed Parents

Anthromama reminded me of this in her comment yesterday.

When I was 15 or 16, I had a little bit of crush on Kate Bush.  This was not an uncommon state for adolescent boys in 1978.  Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve carried a torch for La Bush for nearly thirty years (THIRTY YEARS!) but when she unexpectedly emerged from seclusion/regular life to release “Aerial”, I paid attention.
The first single was ‘King of the Mountain and the video would have been fairly forgettable, other than for the first sighting of Kate Bush for more than a decade.

Watching it, I found myself caught off-guard.  There’s a literary cliche where someone meets an old love, unrequited or otherwise, after many years and finds him or herself unexpectedly moved  by appearances that have changed, by regret for something lost or lived through and never fully grasped, by differences in what should have been shared memories.  Inevitably, the pang is always for themselves.  Kate in the new video had grown middle-aged – vibrantly, beautifully but decidedly so.  Like me, she was a different person: the sylph twining herself around the songs from ‘The Kick Inside’ was gone forever.