I certainly didn’t know it on January 1, nor in any of the months from then to September, but 1976 was very much the year my life began to unravel (that is, to unravel for the first time). Events — self-inflicted wounds, really — which developed during the course of the year so profoundly affected me for the next several years that, in fact, I struggle to remember much of the earlier months…

Oh, yes, till teaching — I remember that much. I vaguely recall that as a no-longer-rookie in the English Department, I’d started to earn something like a measure of professional respect among my colleagues. On the other hand, the respect was tinted with a sort of chiaroscuro of confusion: What the heck is he DOING?, I could almost hear their whispers. The syllabus for my journalism classes was pretty much left to me, as there were no other syllabi to which it could be compared; my Junior-level English classes, though, seemed to confuse the kids as well as the people with whom I shared the teachers’ lounge (and the Junior English syllabus). Honestly, I doubt that if pressed, I could have cleared up the confusion much.

The problem-I-didn’t-know-about-in-January had its origin in the last few months of 1975; it began, as is true of similar problems in the lives of many people, with the phrase, “I met someone.”

Yes, I was still married. My wife and I were still together; in fact, we’d recently signed on with a program designed to strengthen our bonds, and keep us together. Which I guess maybe indicated, in retrospect, that we had some serious issues already percolating under our skins, between our ears…

Anyway, encountering The Other Woman — I’ll just call her “V” here — hit me like a bolt of lightning. She was cute, verbally sharp as a tack, a rapid-fire conversationalist with a bubbly laugh (its look and its sound) which I’m pretty sure I’ll never forget. And to top it off, she was teaching at the same school, in the same English department, so there were lots of opportunities to cross each other’s paths…

Long story short: by the end of 1975 I was living by myself, in a smallish one-room apartment on the third floor of what had at one time been a mansion in a nearby historic town, the first couple floors of which were now occupied by the offices of a successful real-estate company. I was so happy with V (I believed, and still kinda believe) — and so looked forward to what 1976 would bring. She was going away for Christmas break, to New Orleans, and when she got back we’d, well, we’d really dive into the relationship.

Then I got the phone call. Nothing so grandly tragic as a report of her death, nothing like that. No, she had just — yes indeed! what goes around, etc.! — “met someone.” On top of which, she would be marrying him, and very soon…

[Aside: V did not end up marrying him, after all. She learned that he was already married, which kind of scrambled the impact of her assertion during that phone call with me — that she couldn’t wait for me, given New Jersey’s separation-and-divorce requirements: it would take too long to formalize it all with marriage.]

Wow, did I go into a tailspin. (Turnabout, meet Fair Play.) Sometime in early spring, trying to assert myself in some positive way, I bought a motorcycle… and promptly totaled it in an accident (which caused no injuries or property damage except to the bike itself, of course, and to my self-esteem)…

I got a reprieve, mid-year, when one of my sisters got a job teaching at a different nearby school district: would I be interested in sharing an apartment with her? Why yes! Yes, I would!

And so it went, through another few months’ cabdriving, and the start of a new school year in September. Those last few weeks of “normalcy” lasted all the way up to the mid-autumn, and the beginning of a teachers’ strike in the school district where I taught. By then, the months-distant 1977 was already shaping up as a year more interesting than I would’ve imagined — let alone hoped for.

Postscript: V, as it happened, moved into a condo in a complex near the apartment I shared with my sister. This was coincidence; we had not been in touch, and she’d have had no way of knowing it — especially since she’d transferred in September to teach at a different high school. But she tracked down my phone number somehow, and invited me over. We split a bottle of wine, talked pleasantly but (as I remember) about nothing of substance, laughed from time to time, and then parted ways. I ran into her in a shopping mall one more time, in early 1979; again, we chatted without rancor or recrimination, and that was the last I saw of her.

About the playlist…

It’s shorter than the previous ones — which, as I mentioned, probably doesn’t surprise me. Aside from the preoccupations described (hinted at, more like) above, I think I was just, well, enjoying music less. I’d never been much of a dancer, but disco, via AM radio, was forcing the issue: Put up or shut up, it was saying to the audience; Take it or leave it. This is what I’m offering you now. I took that bet, and started listening less to AM radio, more to the edgier FM stations — and began buying music, in the form of LPs, more than I had for years. Which translated, largely, to buying music I already knew I’d enjoy. (“You tell me that it’s evolution/Well, you know/We all want to change the world…But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out”: still in my late 20s, and already verging on pop-culture fuddy-duddiness.)

Some specific notes:

• Following my usual practice, I started building this playlist by referring to the year’s “Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles” list (per Wikipedia). And the only selection criterion was unchanged: if I remembered the song coming out of a car radio, onto the list it went; otherwise, nope. Now, seeing what I’d overlooked or ignored was an… instructive experience. Hall & Oates! David Bowie! Queen, for crying out loud! Indeed, the two Fleetwood Mac songs on my list are there only because they became important to me in later decades — not because I would’ve cited them, given the same criteria, by the end of 1976 itself.
• “Convoy”: what a, well, bizarre hit song. It rode the coattails of the then-current fad for CB radio, and also directly referenced current events of the time — 1974’s National Maximum Speed Limit law, which had imposed a 55-miles-per-hour limit in response to a gasoline shortage. In retrospect, I wonder if this might not have been a precursor to later “The government is taking away our freedoms!” extremism.
• The Beatles, jeez, yes: “Got to Get You in My Life” had first been released in 1966, on the Revolver album… but hit the Billboard list again ten years later thanks to an anthology of the band’s hits.